T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology 9780567675446, 9780567675477, 9780567675460

Citation preview

T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology

T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology Edited by Antonia Michelle Daymond Frederick L. Ware Eric Lewis Williams

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 This paperback edition published in 2022 Copyright © Marilyn Dunn, 2019 Marilyn Dunn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgment on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Liz O. Baylen / Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third- party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Names: Daymond, Antonia Michelle, editor. Title: T&T Clark handbook of African American theology / edited by Antonia Michelle Daymond, Frederick L. Ware, Eric Lewis Williams. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York: T&T Clark, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007783 | ISBN 9780567675446 (hardback) | ISBN 9780567675453 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Black theology. | African Americans–Religion–History. Classification: LCC BT82.7.T25 2019 | DDC 230.089/96073–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007783 ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7544-6 PB: 978-1-3503-2040-6 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7546-0 ePUB: 978-0-5676-7545-3 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In Memory of James H. Cone (1938–2018) Katie G. Cannon (1950–2018)

Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgment Introduction Part One 1 2 3

4 5 6 7

x xiii

Frederick L. Ware

Historical Investigations

The African American Struggle for Human Dignity in Chattel Slavery and Afterwards Beverly Eileen Mitchell Re-evaluating Roots: Slavery as Source and Challenge for African American Theology Alexis S. Wells-Oghoghomeh Then and Now: Salvation, White Supremacy, and Black Agency in the Aftermath of the White Supremacy Campaign of 1898 and Presidential Election of 2016 Sharon J. Grant Engaging History Theologically: Early Afro-Pentecostal Interracial Communities as Sites of Emancipatory Politics David D. Daniels “Peace Be Still”: James Cleveland and the Paradox of Peace in the Civil Rights Movement Johari Jabir African American Evangelicals Soong-Chan Rah The Classroom and Pulpit of the Public Theologian: A Brief Survey of Black Faith Tradition(s) Adam L. Bond

Part Two

1

9 19

33 47 59 73 89

Theological Method and Construction

8

The Hebrew Bible and Black Theology: Fresh Hermeneutical Considerations for Liberation Theologies and Situating the Teachings of Jesus Harold V. Bennett 9 From Ideology to Theology: Toward a More Liberating Doctrine of Revelation Harry H. Singleton 10 The Reality of God and Racism: Shifting Paradigms in Race, Culture, and the Church Henry J. Young 11 Is Racism in America a Functional Refutation of the Classical Philosophical View of Understanding as Pertaining to Universal Concepts? Cyril Orji

103 117 125

139

Contents

viii

12 Theological Considerations of Being Human while Black Antonia Michelle Daymond 13 Pneumatology and Contemporary Theological Discourse William C. Turner 14 Mad with Supernatural Joy: On Representations of Pentecostalism in the Black Religious Imagination Eric Lewis Williams 15 Baptism and Holy Communion: Affirming that Black Lives Matter Brad R. Braxton 16 God and Time: Exploring Black Notions of Prophetic and Apocalyptic Eschatology Lisa Marie Bowens 17 Methodological Development in African American Theology: The Influence of Past Historical Periods upon Contemporary Black and Womanist Thought Walter R. Strickland II 18 The Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement of African American Theological Production James S. Logan 19 The Church and the Tangent: Everybody’s Protest Theology Matthew V. Johnson Part Three

169 183 197 213

225 237 257

Church, Ministry, and Leadership

20 Prophetic Preaching and Theological Reflection Kenyatta R. Gilbert 21 Plenty Good Room Revisited: The Quest for a Radically Inclusive Twenty-first-century Black Church Marcia Y. Riggs 22 Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement: Four Perspectives Beverly J. Goines 23 Receiving the Body as Gift: African American Christian Ethics and the Harlem Renaissance as a Theo-Ethical Intervention Reggie L. Williams 24 Theology, Praxis, and Leadership: Paradigm for Black Churches Forrest E. Harris 25 Black Church Pastors as Chief Executive Officers: A Theoretical Reframing of the Debate Nimi Wariboko Part Four

151

271 283 297

313 323 335

Dialogues

26 Black Theology and Black Humanism Duane T. Loynes, Sr. 27 White Feminist Theologies and Black Womanist Theologies Karen Teel 28 Jewish Theology and African American Theology in Dialogue Kurt Buhring

353 367 379

Contents 29 Black Theology and the Care of the Soul, Mind, and Body: Reading African American Theology from a Black British Perspective Delroy Hall 30 African American Theology and Her Siblings in the Caribbean Diaspora: Toward a Theology of a Plurality of Praxis in the Black Atlantic World Delroy A. Reid-Salmon 31 Metals and Movens of Colored Television: The Spirit is a Bone: A Response to Marla F. Frederick’s Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global Nimi Wariboko Epilogue Eric Lewis Williams and Antonia Michelle Daymond Biblical Citations Index Subject Index

ix

391

403

417 431 435 437

List of Contributors Harold V. Bennett, Dean of C.H. Mason Theological Seminary, the Church of God in Christ affiliate of the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Associate Professor of Religion, Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia. Adam L. Bond, Associate Professor of Church History and American Baptist Liaison, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Virginia Union University, Richmond, Virginia. Lisa Marie Bowens, Assistant Professor of New Testament, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey. Brad R. Braxton, Director of the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life and the Supervisory Curator of Religion at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC; and Founding Pastor of The Open Church of Maryland in Baltimore. Kurt Buhring, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. David D. Daniels, the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity, McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois. Antonia Michelle Daymond (Independent Scholar, USA) is a constructive Christian theologian working in the areas of contemporary models of theology as well as systematic and philosophical theology. Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Professor of Homiletics, Howard University School of Divinity, Washington, District of Columbia. Beverly J. Goines, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Study of African American Religious Life at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, District of Columbia. Sharon J. Grant, Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity, Hood Theological Seminary, Salisbury, North Carolina. Delroy Hall, Bishop and Regional Overseer, Region 5 of the Church of God of Prophecy, Leeds, United Kingdom. He is a senior student counselor and well-being practitioner at Sheffield Halem University and lectures at Leeds Beckett University.

Contributors

xi

Forrest E. Harris, President and Professor of Ministry, Theology and Black Studies, American Baptist College; and Associate Professor of the Practice of Ministry and Director of the Kelly Miller Smith Institute on the Black Church Studies, Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee. Johari Jabir, Associate Professor of African American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago. Matthew V. Johnson, Pastor of Mount Moriah Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama; and Vice Chair of the Social Justice Commission of the Progressive National Baptist Convention. James S. Logan, Associate Academic Dean and Professor of Religion and African and African American Studies, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana. Duane T. Loynes, Sr. Assistant Proffessor of Urban Studies and Africana Studies, Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. Beverly Eileen Mitchell, Professor of Historical Theology, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, District of Columbia. Cyril Orji, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Dayton in Ohio. Soong-Chan Rah, the Milton B. Engebretson Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois. Delroy A. Reid-Salmon, Pastor, Grace Baptist Chapel, New York City, USA; and Research Fellow, Oxford Center for Christianity and Culture at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Marcia Y. Riggs, the J. Erskine Love Professor of Christian Ethics, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. Harry H. Singleton, Professor of Religion and Theology, Benedict College, Columbia, South Carolina. Walter R. Strickland II, Associate Vice President for Diversity Initiatives and Assistant Professor of Systematic and Contextual Theology, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina. Karen Teel, Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, University of San Diego in California. William C. Turner, the James T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Preaching, Duke University Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina.

xii

Contributors

Frederick L. Ware, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Theology, Howard University School of Divinity, Washington, District of Columbia. Nimi Wariboko, the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics, Boston University School of Theology, Boston, Massachusetts. Alexis S. Wells-Oghoghomeh, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Eric Lewis Williams, Curator of Religion, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, District of Columbia. Reggie L. Williams, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois. Henry J. Young, the Neal & Ila Fisher Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois; and Visiting Professor of Theology and Ethics, Hood Theological Seminary, Salisbury, North Carolina.

Acknowledgment Unless otherwise stated, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction Frederick L. Ware

The year 2019 is significant for several reasons. The year marks the passage of fifty years since the publication of James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, the first text of its kind, which launched black theology as an area of scholarship and teaching in seminaries in the United States and other parts of the world. His book and later works were translated into many languages for a global readership. In 2018, James Cone died. One of the many students whom he mentored, Katie G. Cannon, died also in 2018. She is recognized for pioneering womanist theology and ethics. In appreciation of their labor and legacy in the contemporary black theological movement, this volume of essays is dedicated to their memory. This volume of essays is unique, quite exceptional in comparison to other anthologies on black and womanist theology. Among the contributors are young scholars in the early or middle stages of their careers and senior scholars well beyond mid-career status. Most but not all of the contributors are trained systematic theologians. Within the group there are biblical scholars, ethicists, homileticians, church leaders, historians, pastoral care professionals, and academic administrators. The volume therefore matches their many voices, styles, varied approaches, and disciplinary perspectives. For all contributors, black life and culture is a matter of ultimate concern. The volume illustrates the degree to which African American theology, as a covering term for studies of various sorts, is capable of exploration from multiple vantage points across the curriculums in theological and religious studies. The collection of essays is divided into four parts. In Part I, Chapters 1–7, the essays are not only studies of traditions in black religious thought but also demonstrations of the ways by which historical studies may be done. Beverly Mitchell, in Chapter 1, and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, in Chapter 2, examine the period of slavery in the United States. Wells-Oghoghomeh describes the four religious traditions (West African religions, Islam, Christianity, and non-institutional religions) that form the roots, a vast resource of sacred beliefs and practices from which African American religiosity emerged and continues to be informed. Mitchell’s focus is mainly on Christianity, noting how the enslaved interpreted Christianity for support of their struggle for freedom and justice and affirmation of their dignity. Mitchell describes the dehumanizing effects of chattel slavery that were countered by the practices of resistance developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants. For them, human

2

Handbook of African American Theology

dignity, their essential worth as persons, was determined by God. According to Mitchell, the striving for human dignity continues unto today and the successes of the enslaved to maintain their humanity are relevant wisdom and inspiration for the oppressed of today. Chattel slavery no longer exists in the United States but its legacy of racism is institutionalized in American society and culture. Sharon Grant, in chapter 3, and David Daniels, in chapter 4, utilize historical study for an archaeology, dig and retrieval, of ideals in the lived experiences of persons slightly before or immediately following the start of the twentieth century. Whereas salvation has meant both life in the hereafter and here-and-now, Grant examines the political campaigns of 1898 and Presidential election of 2016 for determining and contrasting the temporal meanings of salvation for African Americans facing, in both historic electoral cycles, a resurgence of racism. In Daniels’ reading of the Pentecostal movement in the early twentieth century, blackled interracial and wholly African American Pentecostal groups developed, in contrast to white ecclesial groups, theologies and practices of egalitarianism and racial inclusion. In chapter 5, Jabir examines the phenomenon of sonic politics, that is, the political workings of songs in their performances in social and cultural life, in particular the genre of gospel music created by James Cleveland who rose from the black working class to challenge black bourgeois culture and normative conceptions of human sexuality. In chapter 6, Soong-Chan Rah examines the formation of African American evangelical identity in the 1960s and 70s. Studies of American Evangelicalism often exclude black evangelicals who are as firmly committed to fundamental Christian beliefs but who fiercely pursue, in contrast to their white counterparts, social justice. Lastly, in chapter 7, Adam Bond examines the public theology of Samuel Dewitt Proctor, Howard Thurman, and M. Shawn Copeland who represent the various ways black Christian faith is expressed in civic engagement. According to Bond, in the spheres of church and society, Proctor, Thurman, and Copeland live the vocation of uplifting the marginalized and oppressed through their work of speaking, writing, teaching, and doing the truth of God’s word. In Part II, Chapters 8–19, which is the largest section of the volume, the essays deal with methodological issues, disciplinary development, and doctrinal beliefs and themes in African American theology. Harold Bennett, in Chapter 8, and Harry Singleton, in Chapter 9, deal with foundational sources in Christian theology, the Bible and revelation. Bennett proposes a new hermeneutics for understanding and appropriating the ethical imperatives in extant texts on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, and other writers whose views appear in the Christian New Testament. Bennett’s essay brings new insight for African American theologians whose conceptions of the black Christ have not engaged sufficiently Jesus’s ethnicity in its proper literary contexts. In other words, African American theologians’ appeal solely to the Exodus paradigm, although an important emphasis, leads to an oversight of the rich complexity of Jesus’s identity and ministry among Jewish people of the first century. Bennett’s offering in hermeneutics will help African American theologians to do a better job in Christology. Singleton proposes, with regard to the doctrine of revelation, that three concepts be clarified, even reimagined: the scope of revelation, the life of Jesus, and the coming kingdom (reign) of God. It is not always clear, in African American theology, what the sacred is. African American theology rises above

Introduction

3

ideology with a better sense of that which is revealed by God beyond but not necessarily in contradiction to the truth found in the black experience. Henry Young, in Chapter 10, Cyril Orji, in Chapter 11, and Antonia Daymond, in Chapter 12, examine the nature and basis of racism and its impact on theistic belief, the formation of human identity and development of social relationships. Young discusses how whiteness, as symbol, leads to racism and how God-talk sanctions racism. Beyond directing attention to the problem of racism and its validation by religion, Young suggests ways for us to reconstruct ethnicity and our conception of God in a manner that fosters meaningful social relations in genuine human community. Orji, a Nigerian Catholic theologian, examines the racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, through the lens of Bernard Lonergan’s epistemological theory. Orji concludes that the difference in the perceptions or attitudes between these Whites and Blacks is attributable to how they create different constructions of the objects (phenomena) related to race and racism, not in the processes of judgment (perceptions) which are the same in all human thinking. Daymond ponders the question of what it means to be human, taking into consideration the impact of race, gender, and sexuality on the human condition. William Turner, in Chapter 13, constructs a pneumatology, or theology of the Holy Spirit, from a black Pentecostal perspective. In Chapter 14, Eric Williams discusses how Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Ithiel Clemmons construct different perspectives of Pentecostalism. From their studies, Williams makes a case for balanced scholarship involving critique of the excesses as well as affirmation of the positive qualities of Pentecostalism. In Chapter 15, Brad Braxton provides historical context and biblical interpretation for the practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper and offers pastoral wisdom for improvements in ritual observances that underscore the value of Black people’s lives, sustain them in the struggle for liberation and quest for human fulfillment, and make real the presence of Christ in their communities as centers of human agency in God’s transformation of the world. In Chapter 16, Lisa Bowens examines eschatology in African American religious history, as a unique understanding of God and hopeful anticipation of the end of time which may be depicted as in terms of the afterlife or, more often, as judgment and reward meted out by God for correction of injustice in this world. Hope of God’s transformation of the world is wed to the notion of human partnership with God in bringing about this change. Walter Strickland, in Chapter 17, and James Logan, in Chapter 18, examine the disciplinary development of African American theology. Focusing on how, over the large expanse of time, the ways in which African American theology has been done, Strickland describes the methodological approaches unique to three historical periods: the Pre-Civil War Era (1619–1864), the Institutionalization Period (1865–1908), and the Civil Rights Era (1909–68). Focusing on more recent history, the last five decades, Logan discusses the rise of black and womanist theologies, the ethics formulated for dealing with violence, liberation, and reconciliation, the functions of black and womanist theologies as political theology, and the predicament of black people learning, if successful at all, African American theology in predominantly white educational institutions. Lastly, in Chapter 19, Matthew Johnson offers a critical perspective on the questionable practices and disciplinary alliances of black theology in the academy. According to Johnson, black theologians have created an ontology of the black church that does not cohere with the

4

Handbook of African American Theology

actual diversity, social complexity, and modes of religiosity and piety in African American church traditions. He goes further to argue that, while black theologians have, rightly, critiqued capitalist materialism and political quietism in black churches, they have overlooked the economic influences of the academy on the development of black theology itself as well as black theology’s assumption of liberal Protestant theology. He advocates for a construction of black theology that is self-reflective, rigorous, and related organically to black churches. He raises the question: What is the Divine, the transcendent reality, which theology from the black perspective contemplates and seeks to live in light of? He proposes a focus on the fundamentals of systematic theology, the use of “shaper drills and sophisticated tools,” for deeper probing into the black religious experience. In Part III, Chapters 20–25, the essays deal with preaching, the moral ideas and ideals informing social action, and models of community, ministry, and leadership. In Chapter 20, Kenyatta Gilbert highlights the nature and function of African American prophetic preaching in conversation with the calling, message, and agenda of the Hebrew prophet, noting points of comparison and contrast between the proclamation of the biblical prophet and the black preacher. He emphasizes the renewal of prophetic preaching for the flourishing of black churches and communities today. Marcia Riggs, in Chapter 21, and Beverly Goines, in Chapter 22, deal with the quality of relations, internal and external, for black churches. Their essays deal with the dilemmas of the black church as beloved community and community builder. This is the question: How may the black church relate its perspective on black identity and solidarity to a broadly cast vision of human unity and Christianity’s global mission to all humankind? The challenge facing the black church is how it can be both race-specific (focused on the concerns of black people) and humanitarian with regard to persons of other ethnicities in the United States and elsewhere in the world, not to mention embrace the diversity of Christianity worldwide. Goines examines the ways that ecumenism is practiced, lived, by four black clergy/scholars: Thomas Hoyt, D.H. Kortright Davis, Frederick Ware, and Delores Carpenter. Riggs proposes a radical ethic of love manifest in justice. This ethic is guided by four principles: 1) do no harm; 2) embrace, do not simply tolerate, one another in your unique differences; 3) name the violence that divides and alienates us; and 4) respond and live in the call to be agents of liberation in the world. In Chapter 23, Reggie Williams turns to the Harlem Renaissance for illustration of the kind of work that ethicists need to do in order to establish, in fact re-establish, a framework for valuing black bodies and lives. From a Christian point of view, Holy Communion, the ritual of remembering Jesus’s body and suffering, becomes an invitation for believers to remember other broken bodies in the world and unite with all persons in genuine human community. Forrest Harris, in Chapter 24, and Nimi Wariboko, in Chapter 25, deal with leadership in black churches. Harris points to the prophetic tradition of black Christianity as a resource for the renewal of moral and social justice leadership. According to Harris, the prophetic tradition as he models it for today has three important aspects: 1) theology (i.e., education that liberates from the distortions of Christian faith); 2) ministry (i.e., building the capacity of persons and congregations for the work of social transformation); and 3) leadership (i.e., vision and action for healing of various sorts in black communities). According to Wariboko,

Introduction

5

in the history of the black church the pastor has, among many roles, functioned as a chief executive officer (CEO). He notes that there is an irony in black churches: clergy resist the CEO model, not recognizing that this is a significant component of pastoral ministry in the black church. Exclusive focus on the CEO model, what Wariboko calls the CEO-impulse, is problematic but just as bad is the denial of the model altogether. Part IV, Chapters 26–31, represents significant dialogues within African American theology or between African American theology and other theological traditions. Duane Loynes, in Chapter 26, Karen Teel, in Chapter 27, and Kurt Buhring, in Chapter 28, are among the many scholars today who are engaging African American theologians in dialogue with other theological and intellectual traditions. In Chapter 26, Loynes discusses the work of William R. Jones and the more recent work of Anthony B. Pinn in the development of black humanism, viewed as either a critique of black Christian theism or an alternative to it. In either case, black humanism offers African American theologians the opportunity for stimulating, even challenging, conversation with African American philosophers. In Chapter 27, Karen Teel shares the story of the intellectual journey that led to her study and conversation with womanist theologians. In her essay, she emphasizes several topics of concern around which further dialogue may take place between white feminist and black womanist theologians. In Chapter 28, Kurt Buhring places black theologians James Cone and Dwight Hopkins in dialogue with Jewish theologians Emil Fackenheim and Melissa Raphael. In the perspectives of Hopkins and Raphael, Buhring sees the extension of black and Jewish theologies in new directions with respect to the conception of God, interpretation of human suffering, and moral and ethical action in response to this suffering. Delroy Hall, Delroy Reid-Salmon, and Nimi Wariboko are interlocutors who are expanding, broadening, the meaning of blackness and the black experience in African American theology. In Chapter 29, Delroy Hall reviews the parallels in the historical experience and social contexts of black people in the United States and in the United Kingdom (many of whom had relocated from the Caribbean). According to Hall, the origin and development of black theology in both settings has been towards the aim of care of the body, soul, and mind of black people. In Chapter 30, Reid-Salmon interrogates the meaning of “African American” and the definition of “African American theology” in light of how immigrants of black African descent from continental Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere are broadening, even challenging, the conception of black racial identity and religious thought in the United States. He argues that African American theology, as it is presently configured, exhibits exclusivist tendencies similar to Euro-American theologies. In his essay, he highlights the contributions of the Caribbean diasporan church to Christianity in the United States and proposes collaborations on multiple levels between African Americans and Caribbean Americans. Lastly, in Chapter 31, Wariboko offers a critical review of Marla Frederick’s book Colored Television, a story of how television has led to the globalization of black religion and subsequently expanded the meaning of “black church.” Wariboko is versed in several intellectual traditions but is still firmly located in Nigerian Pentecostalism. His essay illustrates the robust dialogue that is needed not only between black scholars but between black and non-black scholars, if black

6

Handbook of African American Theology

intellectuals are to achieve a voice that merits attention and respect in the global community. The volume closes with an epilogue written by my co-editors Antonia Daymond and Eric Williams, both recent Ph.D. recipients and emerging scholars with great promise for contributions to the field of theology. Whereas I am fortunate to have lived through most of the decades (close to 40 years) of the contemporary black theological movement, they are uniquely positioned to dream a bright future of the field in ways that I am unable to because of the past, which, like a cloud, limits my forward gaze. I have lived to see most of the future that I once envisioned. African American theology is well into what Williams R. Jones called the stage of systematic construction. Consistent in the contemporary black theological movement, over time, has been the moral overtone of freedom, equality, and justice. However, African American theologians are today exploring topics and engaging systems of ideas beyond the range of issues debated by the pioneering black and womanist theologians. My hope was to see, and I have seen up to this point in time, this exponential development of the field. Daymond and Williams’s view is a keener insight into the present status of the field and a creative imagining of its future. In the epilogue, they share their vision of new directions in African American theology.

Part One

Historical Investigations

1

The African American Struggle for Human Dignity in Chattel Slavery and Afterwards Beverly Eileen Mitchell

Chattel slavery: a context for black dignity? The frightened shackled men and women, transported as cargo under deplorable conditions on slave ships bound for places unknown, were in a state of heightened vulnerability. They were among kidnappers, whose language they could not understand, whose appearance was strange and off-putting. Yet, the hapless captives could perceive the signs that they shared the same species. The soon to be enslaved were now inextricably bound together in a nightmarish tableau. This involuntary sojourn marked the beginning of a centuries-long bitter struggle to live freely as the creatures God might have intended them to be. Despite the degrading conditions and inhumane treatment these ancestral forefathers and foremothers endured, they did so with their dignity intact. While slavery is as old as human community and exists even in our time, in the form of debt slavery,1 the conditions governing this institution in the United States were particularly degrading and dehumanizing for the enslaved. For the most part, slavery in the United States was reserved for those who were designated as “black,” and quickly became a hereditary system, whereby the status of the mother determined the status of her children. Unless they managed to purchase their freedom or fled from bondage, the enslaved could expect that they would retain their status of enslavement in perpetuity.2 Throughout the practice of slavery in the United States, laws were enacted to codify the restrictions placed upon the enslaved. Fugitive slave narratives and oral testimonies of former enslaved blacks are an indispensable source of information regarding the practice of slavery in the United States. A review of this literature provides a window into the ways in which the enslaved perceived their condition under antebellum slavery. These documents and oral testimonies refute the commonly promulgated notion offered by southern whites, who maintained that slavery was a benign institution that functioned for the well-being of the enslaved. The experience of the enslaved in their own words makes clear that slavery was anything but benign. The narratives of the enslaved bear witness that the practice of chattel slavery often involved the denial of adequate food and clothing. It prohibited access to the kind of

10

Handbook of African American Theology

activities that would have enhanced the quality of the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life of the enslaved. Excessive corporal punishment of the enslaved was not uncommon. Sexual exploitation was frequent. Slavery, with its concentration of domination and control in the hands of a few, was a battleground for the corruption of moral agency of men and women. Not only politicians, but even ministers attempted to defend the institution as a moral good that was scripturally condoned. Proponents of the institution frequently denied the brutality perpetrated by those overseeing the system. However, the victims of enslavement have left their own perception of slavery that suggests a different reality from what defenders of the system described.

Human dignity defined There is deep irony in the notion that the dehumanized reveal to us what it means to be human in a way that the human being in his or her best finery or at the height of great achievement cannot reveal. A profound grasp of what it means to be human requires an unflinching look at the human condition in all its facets. In the context of dehumanization, it is easier to see the fullness of our vulnerability. That vulnerability betrays any false notions of complete autonomy from the need for harmonious fellowship with both the divine and other human beings, because our interconnectedness to the Source of all life and our ties to the creatures most like us is made more apparent. Human dignity is bound up in that interrelatedness. As I have stated elsewhere, “an understanding of human dignity within the context of dehumanization calls attention to our interrelatedness, not simply as one species among many, but the species whose distinctiveness is marked by some special connection to God.”3, 4 Not all the enslaved were Christian; however, the enslaved who embraced Christianity grounded their value and worth in Genesis 1:27, where the biblical writer proclaims, “Then God said, ‘And let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.’ ” The Genesis 1 passage describing the creation of human beings invites theological reflection regarding the significance of what the divine has bestowed on the human creature. Dignity or sacredness has been gifted to the human being by virtue of our having been made in the image of God.5 Because it is an intrinsic part of what it means to be human, dignity is given to all humans, regardless of abilities, capabilities, or disabilities, physical or mental. This dignity is unmitigated by our racial/ethnic background, our economic, social, or political status, our sexual identity, or any other identifiers. We are not only connected to our Creator by this divine imprint, but are also connected to each other in a web of interrelatedness and interdependency. By sharing in that which makes us human, there is a social dimension to this dignity. The social dimension is reflected in the human need to have our dignity as human persons acknowledged and affirmed for a true sense of well-being. When that need for reciprocal acknowledgment is denied, our sense of deprivation is greatly intensified.6 Enslaved Christians would not have articulated this theological reality in quite these terms, but they intuited this in their resistance to mass internalization of the bombardment of messages of their “sub-humanness” and their inability to do anything other than to accept a status likened to that of beasts of burden.

The Struggle for Human Dignity

11

It is impossible to address the nature of human dignity in the context of slavery without addressing the relationship of freedom to dignity. Freedom is a critical component to any notion of human dignity because it affords the human creature the opportunity to realize his or her potential as a fully responsible creature made in the image of God. Freedom is self-ownership. It encompasses the right to self-determination; it includes the ability to make choices and decisions about how one will live one’s life, and allows one to regulate one’s own actions. It involves the right to attempt to achieve personal goals to the best of one’s ability without coercion or interference.7 Freedom is the essential foundation upon which human beings are equipped to live out their lives in ways that make them answerable to God for the consequences of their actions, choices, and decisions within the human family. Because this is true, freedom is an essential theological component of what encompasses human dignity. To usurp the right of an individual or group in society to exercise self-determination constitutes a violation of the individual or group’s dignity. Racialized slavery, as practiced in the United States, was constructed and executed to circumscribe the ability of the enslaved to exercise basic freedoms, including the freedom to realize one’s potential as a human who bears the divine imprint. My examination of more than two dozen slave narratives and segments of dozens of oral histories indicates that ten egregious transgressions of human dignity the enslaved most frequently mentioned were: dehumanization at the auction block; the destruction of familial bonds; denial of basic needs for adequate nutrition and protective clothing; denial of the right to establish their own identity; denial of education; punishment for attempting to worship God; physical abuse; sexual exploitation; the loss or denial of freedom; and the denial of the right to self-determination.8 The enslaved perceived these experiences as deprivations that violated their sense of who they were as human beings; principally, because these deprivations were executed with the belief that the enslaved would not experience them as harmful because the enslaved were viewed as lacking the requisite human sensibilities to perceive them that way.

Resistance as affirmation of human dignity Despite the admonition of proslavery preachers in the nineteenth century that “slaves were to obey their masters,” and that slaveholders were comforted by the fiction that their slaves were “happy” with their status; by and large, whether inwardly or outwardly, the enslaved were not content with their status. In situations of oppression, the impulse to resist dehumanization is present to one degree or another. Because they did possess the human sensibility to experience discontent under the humiliating restrictions of enslavement, they did exercise diverse forms of resistance that ranged from small acts of sabotage to flight or even revolt. While, no doubt, many of the enslaved made the best of an unfavorable situation, and remained under bondage until their death, there were some who contemplated the prospect of flight. The number of successful escape attempts of the enslaved cannot be established; however, it is safe to say that the number was relatively small in relation to the number of enslaved over the 245 years in which racialized slavery was openly

12

Handbook of African American Theology

practiced in the United States. Nevertheless, attempts to escape enslavement were made. The contemplation of flight from enslavement evinced tremendous anxiety and great fear. Because their comings and goings were closely monitored, the enslaved found the prospect of flight terrifying. They did not always know where to run; whether it was possible to hide; if they would find provisions for survival; or whether they would be aided or betrayed by others. From observations of the unsuccessful attempts of others, those courageous enough to attempt escape had to ponder the consequences of failure. Some who were recaptured were beaten severely, and in some cases fatally. Restrictive reins were tightened even more after an escape attempt; making further attempts less likely. Recaptured slaves were sold to plantations in the deep South, with the permanent loss of contact with spouses, children, and other loved ones. The enslaved who contemplated escape had to weigh and calculate the risks very carefully. The decision to stay or go was an exercise of resistance reflective of their dignity as full human beings. Slave revolts were another obvious expression of resistance to the slave system. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, there were three highly publicized slave revolts in the southern United States, led by Gabriel Prosser9 of Richmond, Virginia in 1800; Denmark Vesey of Charleston, South Carolina in 1822; and Nat Turner of Southampton County, Virginia in 1831. The latter’s resistance was religiously motivated, for Turner believed that his resistance was at least divinely sanctioned, if not God-ordained. In each of these revolts the men were betrayed. Though these insurrections were unsuccessful in bringing immediate deliverance, each revolt struck a cumulative blow that signaled to slaveholders that their “chattels” were dissatisfied. A more clandestine form of resistance was the Underground Railroad. Neither “underground” nor a “railroad,” it has been identified as an important system of escape that involved more than the flight of the individual. Secret and conspiratorial in nature, escapees had to rely on a network of benefactors to ensure the success of the escape. One of the more daring attempts to escape was that of Henry “Box” Brown, who arranged to have himself shipped to abolitionists in Philadelphia in 1849, in a wooden crate. The stories of Harriet Tubman’s courageous, successful rescues of others after her own escape have long been celebrated. There were untold numbers of those who assisted in the flight of enslaved blacks, including some sympathetic whites. A less popular form of resistance was emigration from the United States. Although occasionally there were African Americans, such as Paul Cuffee, who favored the idea of African Americans leaving the country to form self-governing settlements of free blacks on the African continent, the majority of African Americans did not support the colonization movement.10 Many black abolitionists declined to lend support to this proposed socio-political solution, which was supported by such figures as Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson. Although these African Americans were keenly aware of the shortcomings of the United States, they maintained that this nation was still the country of their birth. They took the position that the colonization scheme was devised to rid the country of free blacks, while continuing the practice of slavery without the influence and agitation of blacks who would undermine the institution.11 This sentiment notwithstanding, in the two decades leading to the Civil War, there were African Americans convinced that black freedom would never materialize, who

The Struggle for Human Dignity

13

entertained more favorably the notion of emigration to Africa and to the Caribbean. Alexander Crummell, an Episcopal priest and missionary, sought to gather support from like-minded free blacks willing to settle in Liberia to serve as Christian evangelists for Africans on the western coast.12 By contrast, Martin Delany’s reasons for emigration seemed largely based upon socio-political considerations. Delany, apparently radicalized by his dismissal from the Harvard Medical School degree program because white students petitioned for his removal, became convinced that the solution to the black condition lay in emigration to Africa. In 1850, two years after his dismissal, he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered. Delany did explore possible sites for a settlement in Africa. However, he returned to the United States in 1861, after the outbreak of the Civil War, where his attention turned to recruiting for the Union army.13 We have significant records of the participation of free and former enslaved African Americans who participated in the abolitionist movement. Abolitionism, both politically and religiously motivated, was a major expression of black resistance to slavery. The abolitionist movement was interracial; however, white abolitionists operated with mixed motives regarding their participation. African Americans who participated found that there were white abolitionists who hated slavery, but who never could entertain seriously the notion of social equality between blacks and whites.14 Black abolitionists also realized that, to ensure that their concerns were addressed with regard to the battle for emancipation, they had to convene their own antislavery gatherings, where they could set their own agenda for the advancement of the African American community. Fugitive slaves who made it to such cities as Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, or Oberlin were a tremendous boon to the abolitionist movement. They gave personal accounts of their experience as slaves, which brought great credibility to abolitionists’ claims of the inhumanity of slavery. The abolitionist movement was an important political movement that was active in northern states and brought political resistance to the institution of slavery. Black abolitionists were effective speakers on the lecture circuit in the United States and England. They also founded antislavery newspapers, in which they published powerful editorials denouncing slavery. The agitation fomented by the abolitionist movement provided an unrelenting pressure of resistance against slavery, with the assistance of African American men and women who refused to remain quiet in the face of the enslavement of their fellow brothers and sisters in the unrepentant South. Events in the 1840s threatened to create an imbalance between the number of free and slave states. As the availability of territory westward began to threaten that balance, political tensions between the North and the South increased greatly. The Missouri Compromise of 1850, which included the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act on March 7, 1850, all but ensured that the fight against slavery would have a violent end. The decade leading to the Civil War saw increased resistance from African Americans who had become discouraged by the lack of success accomplished by the non-violent, “civilized” measures they had previously employed to end slavery. Instead of making headway in Congress and among ordinary citizenry in garnering opposition to slavery strong enough to overturn the slavocracy of the South, Southern politicians were even more strident and unbending in their attempt to force the North to play an active role in

14

Handbook of African American Theology

recapturing African Americans who had allegedly escaped enslavement. However, African Americans (and some whites) were not going to surrender to this pressure quietly. Between 1851 and 1858 there were eight major fugitive slave rescue attempts: one in Christiana, Pennsylvania; one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; one in Oberlin, Ohio; one in Racine, Wisconsin; one in Syracuse, New York; and three in Boston, Massachusetts.15 Recognizing that it was no longer safe for African Americans to live unmolested in the northern United States, upwards of 30,000 fled to Canada; many settled in Chatham, Ontario.16 In many of the fugitive slave narratives and antislavery writings, such as David Walker’s Appeal, African Americans challenged the slavocracy of the United States on two grounds – political and religious. They argued that the practice of slavery in a nation which upheld the political ideals of liberty and freedom constituted the height of political hypocrisy. They also argued that the practice of chattel slavery in a nation that espoused Judeo-Christian values of love of neighbor and the sacred worth of humans made in the image of God constituted the height of religious hypocrisy.

Christianity in the fight for recognition of human dignity Although not all slaves were Christian, the evangelical movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought a mass conversion of the enslaved to Christianity. The work of Albert J. Raboteau has been instrumental in articulating the nature of the exposure of enslaved blacks to Christianity,17 and their subsequent embrace of this tradition. As Raboteau has maintained, African Americans had to struggle with a twofold existential challenge as they encountered Christianity: Was Christianity the “white man’s religion?” If not, “Why did the Christian God allow their unjust suffering?”18 Despite the self-interested motives of their evangelizers, the enslaved accepted Christianity because their interpretation of the gospel was unlike how their evangelizers intended. They interpreted the gospel as a gospel of freedom. The reinterpretation of the gospel by black preachers and exhorters enabled the enslaved to perceive Christianity as a religious tradition that reinforced their instinct that they were of sacred worth in the eyes of God, because Scriptures which indicated that they were humans made in the divine image. They came to draw strength from biblical texts that bore witness to God as a liberator, and this instilled in them the conviction that their freedom was not only worth fighting for, but something that God desired for them. The development of an expression of Christianity that served both as a “Balm in Gilead” and as the inspiration to break the literal and figurative chains of bondage undergirded the efforts of the formerly enslaved and free African Americans to seek political emancipation, social advancement, and economic self-sufficiency as constructive methodologies to secure their freedom. However, these methodologies were also ways in which they attempted to assert their dignity as full human beings, even if their resistance efforts failed to achieve the desired goal. Clearly, the old Negro spiritual Oh, Freedom, was not only a song they sang but a statement of commitment of their existential priorities: “Before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.”

The Struggle for Human Dignity

15

Need for expansion of focus The discussion of the indignity of slavery remains an important aspect of the narrative of the African American experience in the United States. The saga of the journey of African Americans to the New World is not a story of immigrants, that is, voluntary travelers to the Americas for the sake of peace and prosperity; notwithstanding the recent comment of African American surgeon Dr. Ben Carson, the latest Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who described enslaved Africans as immigrants coming to America in search of opportunity.19 Americans of African descent were brought here for enslavement, and chattel slavery is undoubtedly a defining historical moment in our history that has shaped the identity of African Americans and revealed the moral failure of this nation. However, the decisive defeat of the slaveholding South in the Civil War brought the institution of chattel slavery to a bloody end in 1865. As nightmarish as slavery was, it is not the sole issue that has plagued our existence; rather, it is the ideological justification for enslavement, segregation, and persistent second-class citizenship that has kept the black struggle an ongoing, life-and-death contest. Our reflection and research must grapple with the reality that the persistence of the struggle for black justice lies with the ideology of white supremacy, and its grip on the imagination of the dominant culture ensures that the struggle for black dignity continues. While we must never forget the centuries-long enslavement of African Americans, our scholarship and the dissemination of that scholarship must encourage the expansion of our deliberations on the black struggle for justice beyond slavery. Black theology and womanist theology must explore, analyze, and advance our discourse, through interdisciplinary study, toward the manner in which African American women and men, guided by their faith convictions, have labored long and hard on the work of economic, social, cultural, and political emancipation through Reconstruction, through the modern Civil Rights movement, and beyond. Enslavement was only the beginning of the struggle for the recognition of our dignity as human beings. One of the most critical insights we can draw from slavery to the present time is that the greatest challenge to black dignity is the persistence of the ideology of white supremacy which alternately lingers and festers while it continues to plague our sense of ourselves, despite the abolition of slavery and the socio-political gains of the Civil Rights movement. The common thread within the fabric of the black struggle is the permeation of white supremacy in the structures, systems, and major institutions that govern life together in the United States. What history reveals to us is that the focus on the external manifestations of racism is insufficient to tackle what is in essence a deeply spiritual problem. The recognition of the spiritual dimension of white supremacy is both a challenge and an opportunity. Black and womanist theologians must extend our focus beyond the signs of physical enslavement, to speak of the psychic and spiritual liberation needed in our communities. The recent trend of speaking of the devaluing and dehumanization of African Americans through the defacement of their bodies, keeps the discussion concrete and visible.20 Such lines of inquiry have merit and continue to yield important insights that will not only raise pertinent questions with regard to the long-standing implications of

16

Handbook of African American Theology

violated embodiment on the psyche, but will also help to elucidate the interconnection between bodily trauma and psycho-spiritual maladaptation from generation to generation. However, ultimately, analysis of decolonization of the psyche and liberation of the spirit of the African American community must play a greater role in our theological discourse, even as we contend with such developments as the ways in which mass incarceration of black and brown bodies have become another form of social enslavement.21 Though I make this contention, in no way am I suggesting that our scholarship on slavery should cease; nor am I positing a duality that privileges psychic trauma and spiritual wounding over against the bodily impact on lives, past and present, in the African American community. However, I am contending that we must hold these elements in tandem to avoid losing sight of one or the other. African American religious scholars will also have to explore the ways in which secularization, even in the black community, the continued stigmatization of mental health treatment, alcohol and chemical dependency, as well as economic injustice, have all made it difficult for the more vulnerable segments of the black community to overcome the generational legacy of enslavement and the cumulative toll white supremacy exacts on the greater advancement of members of the African American community. In other words, there remain external forces that impede the advancement of the black struggle for justice; however, black scholars must also be prepared to address more openly the ways in which the African American community might attend to the internal impediments to its own well-being. This would include the exploration of constructive strategies amidst the long struggle against external impediments to black justice. Such scholarship would also need to explore ways in which middle and even upper class African Americans can invest their multi-layered levels of privilege into the advancement of the socio-economically segments of the African American community and the wider black diaspora. This will include the need for religious scholars to explore the continuing popularity of such Christian traditions as Pentecostalism, not only in the United States but throughout that segment of the black diaspora that embraces Christianity. Black and womanist theologians can play a significant role in the way the African American community reimagines its future as it engages in a robust praxis that offers not only rhetorical solidarity, but concrete accompaniment in the lives of the most vulnerable of the communities we purport to represent. Finally, it will be incumbent on African American religious scholars to explore more deeply the concept of resilience in black life and the ways in which religious, spiritual, and theological resources contribute to and/or mitigate against resilience. From their capture on the continent of Africa to the struggles of our present hour, African Americans embody what it means to be resilient. Exploration of the nature of individual and communal resilience is critical to ensure that the most vulnerable among us are supported in the continuing struggle for justice.

Notes 1

Kevin Bales has done extensive, credible work with regard to debt slavery domestically (The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today, 2nd edn.

The Struggle for Human Dignity

17

(University of California Press, 2010)) and internationally (Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, 3rd edn. (University of California Press, 2012) and Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves (University of California Press, 2007). 2 Although manumission was an occasional option, as the institution became embattled from the 1830s onward, measures were taken to make manumission more difficult for the slave to obtain. 3 Beverly Eileen Mitchell, Plantations and Death Camps, Religion, Ideology, and Human Dignity (Fortress Press, 2009), 40. 4 Captured Africans who embraced African traditional religions would not have seen themselves as having an autonomous existence apart from God or fellow human beings. For a discussion of human interrelations in the African religious tradition, see Elizabeth Onyedinma Ezenweke and Louis Kanayo Nwadialor, “Understanding Human Relations in African Religious Context in the Face of Globalization: Nigerian Perspectives,” American International Journal of Contemporary Research 3, no. 2 (February 2013), http://www.aijcrnet.com/journals/Vol_3_No_2_February_ 2013/7.pdf, (accessed December 29, 2017.) 5 Mitchell, Plantations and Death Camps, 44. 6 Ibid., 45. 7 This definition of freedom is drawn from language used by the National Gateway to Self-Determination, a consortium of five university centers on the study of disability and quality of life (http://www.ngsd.org/everyone/what-self-determination), and by diplomats to the United Nations. (See transcript of statements made by representatives discussing the topic of Freedom and the Right of Self-Determination at http://www.un.org/press/en/2013/gashc4085.doc.htm, (accessed June 8, 2016.) 8 Resources used for compiling this data include: Yuval Taylor, I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, 1772–1849 (Chicago Review Press, 1999); Yuval Taylor, I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, 1849–1866, vol. 2 (Payback Press, 1999); and James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days, The Slaves Remember, An Oral History (Grove Press reprint, 2002). 9 His last name is not known for sure. He was the slave of Thomas Prosser. Source: http://www.ushistory.org/us/20f.asp, (accessed November 26, 2017.) 10 In 1816, a handful of whites, sympathetic to the plight of the enslaved, but convinced that whites and blacks could never live as social equals in the United States, proposed that freed blacks be encouraged to emigrate to West Africa. In Thoughts on Colonization, white Presbyterian minister Robert Finley wrote about colonization as a plan that seemed to provide the answer for what to do with both the growing free black population and the enslaved population. This publication led to the formation of the American Colonization Society, of which he was a co-founder. A copy of Finley’s tract is published in The African Repository and Colonial Journal, vol. IX (Washington: James C. Dunn, 1834), 332–5. See https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/ courses/1332803/pages/thoughts-on-the-colonization-of-free-blacks-by-rev-robertfinley, (accessed December 28, 2017.) 11 In his Appeal, black abolitionist David Walker was the most eloquent and passionate opponent to voice these objections to colonization. See chapter 4 of Walker, Appeal, To the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular and very expressly, to those of the United States of America, 3rd edn. (Black Classic Press, 2013). 12 Crummell never had a great following of those who shared his vision. He eventually returned to the United States, after serving in Liberia for 20 years.

18

Handbook of African American Theology

13 Online Encyclopedia Index, under “Delany, Martin Robinson,” http://www.blackpast. org/aah/delany-major-martin-robinson-1812-1885, Gerry Butler, contributor, (accessed December 28, 2017.) 14 An egregious example is that even in some antislavery meetings, African Americans were not permitted to sit with whites, but had a designated seating area apart from them. 15 See Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (University of North Carolina Press, 1970). 16 See http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/community/text8/text8read.htm, (accessed December 28, 2017.) 17 See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the South (Oxford University Press, updated edn., 2004). 18 Albert J. Raboteau, “The Black Experience in American Evangelicalism, The Meaning of Slavery,” in African American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture, ed. Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau (Routledge, 1996), 91. 19 Secretary Carson made these comments in a speech at the Department during his first week as secretary, under President Donald Trump, on March 6, 2017. See https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/ben-carson-refers-to-slaves-as-immigrantsin-first-remarks-to-hud-staff.html, (accessed December 28, 2017.) 20 For example, M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, Body, Race, and Being (Fortress Press, 2009). 21 This is addressed in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012).

2

Re-evaluating Roots: Slavery as Source and Challenge for African American Theology Alexis S. Wells-Oghoghomeh

In the appendix to his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself, formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass offered an incisive critique of Christianity and its collusion with southern sociopolitical structures, saying: The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other— devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.1

Douglass’s criticism of “slaveholding” Christianity evinced enslaved people’s discernment of the hypocrisies of Christianity as presented to them by southern power wielders and foreshadowed their adoption of alternative Christian theologies in response to white supremacist doctrines. His words also spoke to a significant, but oftneglected historical reality: contrary to popular cultural images of pious, long-suffering enslaved Christians, most bondspersons were critical of the religious doctrines espoused by pro-slavery Christian apologists and many rejected Christianity outright on account of its entanglement with the violent mechanisms of slavery. As the rhetorical lexicon most frequently weaponized to defend the South’s “benevolent institution,” Christianity was indeed enmeshed in the social, political, and economic structures of southern enslavement. The weekly meetings, black ministerial leadership, and large membership rolls at predominantly black institutional beacons, like the First, Second, and Third African Churches of Savannah, belied the reality of Christian participation for the majority of enslaved people.2 Flanked by a well-armed overseer, many enslaved churchgoers sat in the pews of biracial churches once or twice each month where they listened to tedious ministerial refrains advocating their submission to white mastery.3 Remarking on the compulsory performance of piety demanded of some bondpeople, one formerly enslaved person recalled: “On Sundays Mr. House required all of his slaves to attend church . . . Sometimes a colored preacher was allowed to preach from the sam rostrum after the White pastor had finished. His

20

Handbook of African American Theology

sermon was along similar lines because that is what he had been instructed to say. None of the slaves believed in the sermons but they pretended to do so.”4 The commentator’s frank description of enslaved Christianity echoed Douglass’s divulgence that the majority of enslaved people encountered the religion as a tool of coercion, as opposed to liberation.5 Though it is impossible to accurately gauge the theological leanings of the entire enslaved population, historian Michael Gomez has estimated that as few as 22 percent of enslaved people were avowed Christians at the onset of the Civil War.6 Like Douglass, a number of enslaved people eschewed the “corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land” and instead adopted a mélange of cosmologies, theologies, and practices to help them cope with the exigencies of enslavement.7 For the majority of the enslaved, Christianity was just one of a variety of cosmological and doctrinal orientations that shaped their religious understandings and practices. Consideration of the religiosity of southern enslaved people compels theologians and other scholars of African American religion to grapple with Christian theologies that originate in religious heterogeneity, cultural hybridity, and cosmological polysemy—or rather, genealogies of African American religious consciousness unmoored from Western European Christian paradigms and anchored in ideas indigenous to the enslaved. Focusing primarily on enslaved people in the South, this chapter briefly examines the four trajectories of enslaved people’s religiosity in order to sketch the religious context that shaped many iterations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Christianity. Though explored in separate sections, the trajectories should not be understood as discrete categories, but rather as a repository of cosmologies and practices from which enslaved people drew as they demarcated sacred ideas and acts. Indigenous West African religions, Islam, Christianity, and non-institutional religious traditions collectively influenced the religious ideas and performances of enslaved people in the US South. Consequently, re-evaluating the “roots” of African American theology requires consideration of the rich religious milieu that birthed contemporary African American Christianity.

Indigenous West African religions Although many indigenous West African religions possess some continuities across geographies and cultures, the concept of indigeneity requires some qualification when considering the era of the slave trades. Trade routes between interior and exterior regions, as well as Northern and sub-Saharan Africa, predated the introduction of trade with Western Europe. Nevertheless, the establishment of economic relationships with Western Europeans ushered in a period of rapid change in West and West Central Africa, during which demand from the Trans-Saharan, Trans-Atlantic, and West African slave trades instigated human flows between regions within and outside of Africa. Of the 12,342,433 captive Africans exported from their home continent: 753,360 embarked in Senegambia; 371,331 in Sierra Leone; 333,621 in the Windward Coast; 1,206,603 in the Gold Coast; 1,947,230 in the Bight of Benin; 1,545,202 in the Bight of Biafra; 5,653,806 in West Central Africa and St. Helena; and 531,280 in Southeast Africa and the Indian

Re-evaluating Roots

21

Ocean Islands.8 The numbers speak to how the increasing demand for human labor during the “Age of Exploration” exacerbated demands for African captives and highlight the diverse origins of the progenitors of the African Atlantic diaspora. At the same time, the numbers do not capture the cultural exchanges that predated captives’ embarkation upon vessels bound for Europe, the Caribbean, and America. Even prior to the sixteenth century, the movement of persons between cultures characterized West African forms of enslavement. The West African slave was defined by his or her outsider status—specifically, the lack of kin relations or social ranking in the home culture of their enslavers. As the “only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized by African law,” the ownership of enslaved people represented an attempt to enhance wealth and status within economic structures where land was communally owned.9 Warfare with other groups, tribute payments to more powerful political entities, temporary pawnship agreements for the payment of debt, and judicial punishments were the primary means through which individuals obtained enslaved laborers from other regions prior to the foreign slave trades. These methods remained central to the procurement of captive bodies as Western Europeans engaged in trade with West Africans. However, the scale of the trade shifted dramatically. The flow of human bodies between interior and coastal regions swelled as Western European merchants tapped into pre-existing trade networks to satisfy labor demands in the Americas, and the extent of contact between varied groups intensified as entire villages, kingdoms, and castes entered the trade. As they trekked from interior regions to the coast, languished in barracoons, and worked in coastal slave castles, groups of captive Africans acquired, adapted, and transported various permutations of indigenous religions, Christianity, and Islam. Cosmologies and practices became “indigenous” to new regions as people fled enslavement and integrated into new cultures, and “indigenous” religious repertoires expanded as people absorbed new ideas. As a historical category, indigenous West African religions neither reference neat coteries of practitioners nor static practices, but rather the ever-evolving collection of sacred ideas and performances originated, practiced, or adapted by African-descended people in Africa. The cultural dynamism of indigenous West African religions and their practitioners renders the details of the religions different across geo-cultures. Nevertheless, histories of adaptation and integration have configured cosmological and ritualistic continuities between indigenous West African religions across space and time. These enduring features of many indigenous West African religions traveled with captives to the Americas and provided the infrastructure for Africans’ and their descendants’ creation of new religious forms in the diaspora. Along with the experience of enslavement and racialization, indigenous West African religious elements formed the basis for African American religious distinctiveness. There are seven features of indigenous West African religions that require consideration in examinations of U.S. African American religious consciousness and practice: 1) the absence of the sacred/secular binary; 2) circular temporalities; 3) ancestors; 4) divination; 5) materiality; 6) sound; and 7) movement. The resistance to sacred/secular, natural/supernatural, and other dualistic interpretations of spirit and matter was one of the central cosmological components of indigenous West African religions that captives carried with them to the Americas. For enslaved Africans and

22

Handbook of African American Theology

their descendants, the seen and unseen realms were intertwined: the seen world was animated by spirit powers—like the simbi who inhabited the waterways of the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry—and humans engaged and influenced the spirit world via ritual objects and protocols.10 This understanding of the interconnectedness of the seen and unseen realms shaped bondpeople’s orientations towards materiality, sound, and movement. As evidenced by the continued prominence of nkisi, gris-gris, conjure bags, and other ritualistic material objects in slavery, enslaved people believed that material objects could house spirit powers. Humans could manifest and house spirit powers as well. Tales of nocturnal hags and Christian possession performances described spirits’ forays into human embodiment and spoke to the enslaved’s understandings of the sacred potentialities of matter.11 Sound and movement functioned as mediums for bondpersons’ religious expressions, as well as for communication between the seen and unseen realms. More than just incidental features of ritual performance, sound and movement co-constructed sacred space and facilitated spirit encounters. Movement like the ring shout preceded funerals and celebrations, and actualized enslaved people’s understandings of the circularity of time with counterclockwise, circular movements timed by handclaps, foot stomps, broomsticks, drums, and other percussive sounds. The notion of time as circular, rather than linear, situated the ancestors as vibrant participants in the spirit pantheons of enslaved communities and rendered divination an important part of the ritual repertoire of religious authorities. Contrary to modern Western European notions of “black magic,” divination represented spiritual authorities’ mastery of ritualistic interpretations of human patterns and sacred signs. These features of indigenous West African religions pervaded all other aspects of African American religious performance and distinguished African American religiosity from its counterparts in the Americas. Certainly, Native American and Western European religious influences intermingled with West African antecedents to produce versions of religiosity that varied between southern regions. However, cosmological and ritual features of indigenous West African religions ultimately “domesticated” each religion captive Africans encountered, and in the process, paved the way for the emergence of distinctively African American religious forms.12

Islam Despite the long history of Muslims in early North America from the initial Spanish incursions into Florida to the later arrivals into the Anglo- and Francophone colonies, religious genealogies of U.S. African Americans rarely consider the theological perspectives and historical presences of enslaved Muslims in the Americas. The treatment of African American Muslim histories as tangential, at best, or nonessential, at worst, to understandings of U.S. African American religious consciousness can be attributed to a number of factors, including: the historiographical dominance of Christianity in accounts of enslaved people’s religiosity; the mass conversion of formerly enslaved people to Christianity during and following the Civil War; the disjuncture between pre-Civil War West African Islam and twentieth-century African

Re-evaluating Roots

23

American Islam; and the prioritization of South Asian and Middle Eastern Muslim histories in American religious narratives. In spite of West African Islam’s relatively scant historiographical presence in comparison to Christianity, its historical imprint looms large. Indeed, one of the first Africans to arrive in North America was Muslim, and conversely, one of the first Muslims to arrive in North America was African. Estevan, a black Moroccan, arrived in Florida in 1527 as a part of the Panfilo de Narvaez expedition.13 Estevan’s position as a black, North African Muslim from Spain aboard a ship bound for North America bespoke the wide distribution of the African Muslim diaspora, even prior to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. A brief survey of enslaved Muslims’ histories in the United States reveals the ways West African religious histories shaped the demography of the slave trade to North America, as well as how enslaved people preserved their ancestral religions amid the challenges of enslavement. The early introduction of Islam into Africa provided the basis for many people’s consideration of the religion as indigenous to the continent and shaped how captive Africans and their descendants oriented themselves in the colonial and antebellum religious environment. Islam’s entry into Sudan in the eighth or ninth century heralded the beginning of West African Islam, although the first West African Muslim state was not established until the conversion of War Diaby of northern Senegal in the eleventh century.14 As the religion spread, West African, Northern African, and Arab Muslim political leaders periodically sought to subdue non-Muslims through combat and conquest. Yet, Islam’s success in West Africa can be attributed to Muslims’ reliance on conversion, as opposed to conquest, to spread the religion. North African Muslims dispersed into Western Africa along trade routes as proselytizers, traders, and religious teachers called marabouts. In doing so, they increased the prominence of Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa and added Islam to the West African religious milieu. As the religion’s geographical and economic reach extended, so did its political power. Elite West African converts used the religion to develop relationships with North Africa and consolidate power through Muslim political alliances, even as large contingents of their citizenry continued to practice indigenous religions. The persistence of indigenous religions in kingdoms with Muslim rulers, the infusion of West African Islam with indigenous elements, and the rise of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade precipitated the series of jihads that would send a number of Muslim captives to North America. Despite the Islamic law prohibiting the enslavement of free-born Muslims, North African and Arab Muslims enslaved their West African coreligionists under the pretense of establishing orthodoxy in human- and natural-resource-rich regions.15 In the case of the Futa Jallon jihads, West African Muslims’ impulses to bring their non-Muslim compatriots into religious compliance also resulted in wars that produced captives from Muslim regions. Under the banner of jihad, Muslims from West African Islamic strongholds like Futa Jallon and Hausaland flowed into the TransAtlantic trade as a consequence of conflicts with non-Muslims and Muslims alike.16 Once in the slave trade, Muslims’ Arabic literacy, religious cohesion, and resistance to Christian conversion segregated them from most of their enslaved counterparts and rendered their lives more conspicuous. The number of Koranic schools in theocratic West African polities such as Bundu, Sokoto, and Futa Jallon ensured a high level of literacy among the Muslims who inhabited the regions and subsequently entered the

24

Handbook of African American Theology

slave trade.17 As a mark of “civilization” in the eyes of many Western Europeans, literacy distinguished captive Muslims from their non-Muslim counterparts and elevated their statuses in the racialized hierarchies of the colonial and antebellum U.S. In some instances, their racialization as refined African captives resulted in greater responsibility on southern plantations and farms. Bilali, an enslaved Muslim from Futa Jallon, managed an enslaved workforce of almost five hundred people on the Spaulding plantation on Sapelo Island, Georgia, while Salih Bilali—the descendant of an elite, educated Mandingo Fulbe family—functioned as head driver at the four-hundredperson Couper family plantation on nearby St. Simon’s island.18 In other instances, Muslim identity and literacy presented a pathway to manumission. Job Ben Solomon and Abd Al-Rahman Ibrahima achieved recognition on account of their ability to read and write in Arabic, and used their literacy to achieve freedom and passage back to their homelands. As Christians aimed to proselytize Muslim Africa and the U.S. sought political relationships with Muslim-ruled polities, captives like Ibrahima allied themselves with the global Muslim diaspora and capitalized on American Christians’ religious fervor to achieve the dual goals of material and religious freedom.19 Although the constraints of enslavement limited enslaved Muslims’ capacity to observe practices such as salat (prayers) and the Hajj, many captive Muslims continued to practice Islam in the South. North Carolina bondsman Omar Ibn Said’s references to “the Christians” throughout his autobiographical narrative suggests that a number of enslaved Muslims understood their enslavement and enslavers in terms of religious strivings against non-Muslim forces, in addition to political struggles against racialized socioeconomic structures.20 Said’s documentary legacy attests to Muslims’ use of polysemy and dissemblance to remain faithful to Islam amid the pressure to convert to Christianity. Evidence of prayer rugs and beads on Sapelo Island, as well as mention of the distribution of “saraka” cakes during certain times of the year in the same region, indicate some Muslims’ continued observance of salat and zakat, in spite of the obstacles enslavement posed to their practice. As one of the most religiously cohesive and literate groups to enter into the slave trade, enslaved Muslims offer insight into early African Americans’ theological understandings of West African and American enslavement, the Middle Passage, and the southern religious environment. Captive Muslims’ self-understanding as religious outsiders, despite their entrenchment in racially homogenous communities, invites a consideration of bondpersons’ interpretations of enslavement apart from the racial paradigms imposed upon them by their enslavers. Thus, the histories of Africandescended Muslims in the colonial and antebellum period prove an apt starting point for explorations into pre-twentieth-century African American monotheism.

Christianity In The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, Charles Colcock Jones— the slaveholding Presbyterian minister who assiduously promoted plantation missions and famously authored an oral catechism for Christian proselytization among the enslaved—lamented bondspersons’ “Ignorance of the doctrines and duties of

Re-evaluating Roots

25

Christianity,” and exposed the challenge of defining enslaved African American Christianity. According to Jones, some enslaved people had “heard of Jesus Christ; but who he is, and what he has done for a ruined world, they cannot tell.”21 Though laced with southern paternalism, Jones’s assessment bespoke the extent of bondspersons’ resistance to and reinterpretation of Christian theologies. A part of the religious bricolage of southern communities, Christianity was ubiquitous. Its ubiquity ensured that the religion’s images and lexicons seeped into enslaved people’s religious doings, even though in many cases it was neither the sole nor the predominant theological point of departure. Enslaved people’s theological and cosmological ideas often evinced more religiously diverse origins, even when encased in Christian language. For this reason, it remains difficult to demarcate Christianity among the enslaved. By examining the West African Christian heritage, efforts around the proselytization of bondspersons, the establishment of black religious institutions, and the hegemonic power of Christianity, this section will offer a thumbnail sketch of the religious environment in which enslaved southerners forged the ideas that would ground southern African American Christian religiosity in the post-Civil War era. The objective is not to trace Christianity in the enslaved South, but rather to consider how enslaved people incorporated elements of the religion into broader cosmological frameworks and, in doing so, crafted indigenous expressions of Christian religiosity. Indigenous forms of Christianity first emerged among West Africans on the African continent centuries prior to the mass exportation of captives to North America. Like their African American successors, West African Christian converts engaged with Christianity on account of its sociopolitical and spiritual utility, and understood the religion through pre-existing cosmological, ritualistic, and symbolic frameworks. King Nzinga a Nkuwu of Kongo, baptized João I in 1491, adopted elements of Catholicism following two Kongolese nobles’ simultaneous dreams advocating the religion. Although short-lived, Nzinga’s patronage paved the way for the more significant conversion of his son, Afonso. Afonso attributed his successful military reclamation of the Kongolese throne to the intervention of divine Christian power and proceeded to consolidate his political power through the establishment of a “Christian state infrastructure that operated primarily among the royal court and provincial nobility.”22 Even so, converts did not evince a wholesale acceptance of Western European Christianity as purveyed by their Portuguese tenants, but rather tailored Christian theologies, doctrines, and rituals to suit their needs. Kongolese and Catholic cross symbology, sartorial norms, and traditions of revelation functioned as “spaces of correlation,” where Kongolese nganga Kimpa Vita could be possessed by the Catholic St. Anthony and post-baptismal Catholic salt rites could banish evil spirits.23 The eventual dispersal of almost five million captives into the diaspora from Kongo and other parts of West Central Africa ensured that some of the enslaved had varying degrees of exposure to Christianity prior to their disembarkation in North American ports. Like Islam and indigenous West African religions, Kongolese Christianity was not eradicated by the Trans-Atlantic passage, but rather became a cornerstone for the development of African American religious cultures in the hostile US South. For southern bondpersons, Christianity was mired in the culture of enslavement, which privileged the surveillance of black bodies, preservation of white supremacy, and

26

Handbook of African American Theology

perpetuation of the racialized social caste system. Contrary to narratives of pious slaveholders intent upon proselytizing among enslaved populations, slaveholders and their proxies remained suspicious of enslaved people’s participation in religious rites— even if the rites were Christian—and sought to exert control over how, when, and through whom enslaved people encountered Christianity. Many, like Roswell King, the infamous overseer of the Butler plantation, forbade participation in religious services for fear of the dangerous potentialities of enslaved people congregating en masse.24 Slaveholders’ fears of black literacy and the effects of Christian messages of spiritual equality upon their enslaved populations yielded anti-literacy mandates and the famous 1664 Maryland law that specified that baptism did not entitle enslaved converts to emancipation. Slaveholders who advocated for, or were at least amenable to, the idea of proselytization among the enslaved frequently extolled the virtues of Christianization as a “civilizing” influence, capable of quelling bondspersons’ inclinations for self-liberation and human equality. Charles Colcock Jones advocated proselytization on account of Christianity’s potential to foster positive master–slave relationships, decrease bondpersons’ insurrectionist impulses, and inspire greater economic productivity.25 By 1829, Jones and South Carolinian Methodist missionary William Capers had established the South’s most extensive missions in Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi by affirming the authority of planters, devising oral catechisms, and subjugating messages of spiritual equality to theologies of social hierarchy. Not surprisingly, the number of “professors of religion” was “not large,” according to Jones.26 Catholicism fared slightly better than Protestantism in colonies like Florida, due to the imprint of African and African American captives from Kongo and the Caribbean. However, Catholic strongholds in Louisiana, Maryland, and Kentucky could only boast moderate success, despite Ursuline nuns’ mission to Africans and Henriette Delille’s 1830 founding of the all-black Sisters of the Congregation of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection—which demonstrated the spectacular deviance of African American Christian theological reasoning from white American Christian ideas—precipitated the suspension of many plantation missions, independent religious services, and other proselytization efforts. Turner’s insurrection, along with Gabriel Prosser’s and Denmark Vesey’s conspiracies, spoke to the dangerous possibilities of enslaved Christian theologizing when unmediated by pro-slavery southerners, and to the subversive undercurrents of black religious institutions. The fears that prompted heavy white surveillance of black Christian spaces were well founded: Prosser allegedly planned his ill-fated insurrection at a child’s funeral, while most of the leaders of the Vesey conspiracy were members of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. As a result of the widespread suspicion surrounding black religious gatherings, most black Christian churches originated through the combined efforts of southern blacks and whites, and functioned under the auspices of a white supervisor. George Liele, a progenitor of the black Baptist movement, was encouraged to preach by his Loyalist slave owner Henry Sharp and in turn helped shape two of the most important Christian leaders in the South: David George, leader of the Silver Bluff congregation; and Andrew Bryan, founder of First African Baptist Church in Savannah. Though congregations like Bryan’s boasted thousands of members and a sterling reputation, attendees still endured harassment and the church forcibly operated under the “protection” of a white supervisor.

Re-evaluating Roots

27

The large membership rolls of First African Baptist Church and similar institutions throughout the South belied the realities of many enslaved people’s Christian participation in plantation praise chapels, slave cabin “shouts,” and other extrainstitutional spaces. Indeed, most of the theologies, performances, and songs that rendered African American Christian religiosity distinctive emerged outside of the sanctioned spaces of religious edifices. Brush arbors, partially or fully open air constructions hewn out of tree brush and used for religious exercises by southern blacks and whites, as well as hush harbors—the cabins, clearings, and other spaces that the enslaved designated for religious gatherings away from white surveillance—served as incubators for enslaved African Americans’ religious narratives, theologies, and rituals. Christian narratives and theologies appeared in the songs, quilts, sermons, and other creative productions of southern bondwomen and men, providing evidence that enslaved African Americans “domesticated” the religion, as had their West African predecessors. In the wake of this domestication, Christianity assumed a distinctly African American hue. Even so, the ways that enslaved individuals and communities oriented themselves in relationship to Christianity is not easily decipherable from their patterns of religious participation because of the religion’s hegemonic status in the United States. Christian theologies and narratives remained pro-slavery apologists’ primary mode of defense against public indictments of human bondage, even though the slaveholding establishment often subordinated the moral imperatives of Christianity to the social and economic designs of slavery. Consequently, Christianity had power, even among irreligious slaveholding elites. Like enslaved Muslims, a number of bondpeople understood how Christian affiliation could yield material benefits, such as access to printed Bibles, the opportunity to socialize with a broader geographical swathe of free and enslaved Blacks, and, in some cases, a heightened social status among slaveholders.27 It was the religion’s social power and hegemonic status that rendered it a likely tool for enslaved people intent upon survival.28 They used brush arbors, hush harbors, and other religious spaces away from white surveillance to devise, circulate, and hone religious and sociopolitical ideas that deviated from hegemonic Christianity. Yet, the enslaved did not confine their cosmological meditations to spaces shielded from white gaze. The presence of the Bakongo cosmogram—the symbolic representation of Kongo cosmology—on the floor of First African Baptist Church in Savannah attests to the slippery, polysemous nature of Christianity among enslaved southerners. In these ways, enslaved people carved out spaces for their religious performances and ideas within the religion, and used the religion to carve out spaces for religious ideas that challenged Western Christianity.

Non-institutional religious traditions Non-institutional religious traditions were, undoubtedly, the most ubiquitous manifestation of religiosity among southern enslaved people. The term describes the range of cosmological orientations, spiritual protocols, metaphysical ideas, and spirit

28

Handbook of African American Theology

beliefs that permeated the enslaved religious context, but defied identification with one or any of the aforementioned trajectories. A product of the intersection of religious traditions and cultural backgrounds that occurred at various chronological moments and geographical sites around the African Atlantic, non-institutional religious traditions represented enslaved people’s religious responses to practical problems, such as a stomachache, as well as to more existential fears, like that of death. They were the pragmatic, “everyday” religious ideas that often escaped classification as “religious” on account of their ubiquity. Yet, elements of West African indigenous religions, Islam, and Christianity appeared in non-institutional religious forms, and in fact the selective adaptation and reconfiguration of practices and ideas from each religion formed the basis for most non-institutional religious expressions. For this reason, many noninstitutional religious traditions evince cultural lineages from multiple sources. This section briefly explores four iterations of non-institutional traditions, with the caveat that most of enslaved people’s religious performances exhibited the adaptive, patchwork features characteristic of this category. Despite the diverse religious backgrounds of captive Africans and their descendants in the United States, non-institutional religious traditions represent a point of cohesion—religious ideas that transgressed theological and ethnic demarcations—and are perhaps the form of religiosity most indigenous to enslaved communities. Each of the four iterations of non-institutional religious traditions—conjure, medicine, signs, and haunts—represents wide repertoires of belief and practice. Perhaps the most famous was the collection of performances and ideas the enslaved termed “conjure.” Conjure describes a constellation of non-institutional, “magicoreligious” practices aimed at healing and harming through the manipulation of objects and rituals.29 Founded upon the cosmological idea that there are spiritual causes to material problems and, conversely, material solutions to spiritual problems, conjure addressed concerns ranging from infertility to infidelity. Protective and ritualistic objects—called conjure bags, gris-gris, and other regional names—harnessed sacred spirit power to respond to the immediate needs of practitioners, while conjurers devised protocols for the creation, distribution, and administration of the objects. The spirit powers that animated the objects evinced Christian, Muslim, and indigenous West African origins; consequently belief in conjure did not preclude affiliation with other religious traditions. In a similar manner, medicinal practices among the enslaved crossed religious boundaries and housed cosmological understandings that pervaded communities. For many, herbalism was a “sacred art,” and, as such, healing knowledge was revealed.30 Signs and dreams functioned as sites of revelation and religious knowledge that rivaled and, in many cases, eclipsed other epistemological domains. This conviction that natural and material phenomena foretold personal and communal events coincided with enslaved people’s beliefs in “haunts” and other metaphysical entities which often manifested in dreams and nature. Originating in the historical circumstance of American enslavement and deploying the tools available to the enslaved, non-institutional religious traditions demonstrate how enslaved people crafted their religiosity: by assembling ideas and practices useful for survival in the hostile southern environment. Therefore, the brevity of this section belies its significance. As the most ubiquitous and widely practiced religious thread in

Re-evaluating Roots

29

slavery, non-institutional religious traditions offer an expanded range of cosmological and theological ideas through which to understand religious consciousness among the enslaved.

Conclusion As a source and challenge for African American theology, the era of enslavement compels theologians to wrestle with the material realities of enslaved life and the ways the narratives, practices, and purveyors of Christianity conspired with sociopolitical and economic structures to subjugate African-descended peoples in the Americas. Although some bastions of African American Christianity—such as Bethel African Methodist Episcopal and St. Thomas African Episcopal Churches—emerged outside of the enslaved South, the presence of over three million African-descended captives in the South shaped black Christian theologies and performances, even among free blacks. The violence, cultural humiliation, and physicality of enslavement was intrinsic to how African Americans understood the cosmos and their relationship to it. Therefore, the roots—or origins—of African American theology are intertwined with the religious histories of enslaved people. Exploring the religious lives of those held in bondage invites theologians to articulate more religiously heterogeneous and radically corporeal theological visions.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written By Himself (Boston: Bedford Books, 1993 [1845]), 105–6. According to historian Albert Raboteau, the First, Second, and Third African Churches of Savannah boasted a combined membership of 2,400 persons and three services. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, updated edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 198. The estimate of the number of enslaved people who attended biracial churches varies among scholars. John B. Boles estimates that 43.5 percent of enslaved churchgoers attended biracial services. See John B. Boles, “Introduction” in Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: 1740–1870 edited by John B. Boles (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), 18. George P. Rawick, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Georgia Narratives Part III (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), 201. This idea draws from theologian Delores Williams’s famous argument. Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993). Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 260. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 105. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/ estimates/zah5pjEv (accessed November 7, 2017.)

30 9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

Handbook of African American Theology John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd edn. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 74. For a discussion of the simbi in particular, see Ras Michael Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For a broader discussion of Kongo religious cultures in the Lowcountry, see Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). For more on hags and their significance among enslaved people, see Alexis S. Wells-Oghoghomeh, “ ‘She Come Like a Nightmare:’ Hags, Witches, and the Gendered Trans-Sense among the Enslaved in the Lower South,” The Journal of African Religions 5, no. 2 (2017): 239–74. Jacob K. Olupona discusses the idea of the “domestication” of religious traditions, particularly Christianity and Islam, in the encounter with African peoples in his introduction. Jacob K. Olupona, “Introduction,” in African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions, edited by Jacob K. Olupona (New York: Crossroad, 2000), xv. Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 2nd edn. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 11. Ibid., 13; Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 4; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 61. Diouf, Servants of Allah, 10–12. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 64–5. Diouf, Servants of Allah, 8. Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 34–5. Ibid., 27–32. Omar Ibn Said, Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina, 1831 from The American Historical Review 30, No. 4 (July 1925): 793. Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes. In the United States (Savannah: Thomas Purse, 1842), 125–6. Young, Rituals of Resistance, 49. Art historian Cécile Fromont defines spaces of correlation as “cultural creations such as narratives, artworks, or performances that offer a yet unspecified domain in which their creators can bring together ideas and forms belonging to radically different realms, confront them, and eventually turn them into interrelated parts of a new system of thought and expression.” Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 15. For a discussion of Kimpa Vita and salt rites, see Young, Rituals of Resistance, 50–64. Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839 (Savannah: The Beehive Press, Library of Georgia, 1992, based on the 1863 New York edition), 148. Jones, Religious Instruction, 206–16. Ibid., 125. On the latter point, see Brenda Stevenson, “ ‘Marsa Never Sot Aunt Rebecca Down’: Enslaved Women, Religion, and Social Power in the Antebellum South,” The Journal of African American History 90, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 345–67. Delores S. William names the survival/quality-of-life paradigm in relationship to enslaved people in the southern United States in her seminal theological work; Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 6.

Re-evaluating Roots

31

29 I use the term “magico-religious” consistent with historian Yvonne P. Chireau’s discussion of conjure. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the AfricanAmerican Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 30 For an extensive discussion of the sacred dimensions of healing and health, see Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 38, 76.

Further reading Austin, Allan D. African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles. New York: Routledge, 1997. Brown, Ras Michael. African Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Chireau, Yvonne P. Black Magic: Religion and the African-American Conjuring Tradition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Contrary Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Jennings, Willie J. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, updated edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

3

Then and Now: Salvation, White Supremacy, and Black Agency in the Aftermath of the White Supremacy Campaign of 1898 and Presidential Election of 2016 Sharon J. Grant

Introduction When AMEZ Bishop Alexander Walters penned his 1917 autobiography, My Life and Work, he began the chapter on his work as a founder of the Afro American Council with a question: “What must we do to be saved?” This nuanced inquiry mimicked the query by the fearful prison guard found in Acts 16:30 of the Christian canon. The question raised by the guard connected the societal dilemma of criminalizing Christian activity in the first century by the Roman Empire, to his personal dilemma, as his life and livelihood were bound together in his ability to secure prisoners locked in the inner prison of the Philippian jail. The Lucan author presents the question to affirm the effective witness to Paul and Silas, who were arrested because Paul exercised his power as an exorcist and drove out a spirit who possessed an enslaved girl with an ability to foretell events; this ability made her owners wealthy. The loss of wealth enraged the slave owners, but the miracle provided evidence for the apostolic message that proclaimed the power of God to defeat pagan magic validated the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The disciples were arrested and flogged for the crime of disturbance of the peace. At midnight, after Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise, an earthquake occurred that loosed the prisoners’ chains and opened the prison doors without loss of escaped prisoners. The jailer’s cry for salvation is illustrated by the use of the Greek word sōzō. His conversion is a direct response to the ministry of Paul and Silas while incarcerated. He realized his need to repent and prepare for the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. The author of the Acts of the Apostles presents the Pauline mission to Philippi as a continuation of Jesus’s life and ministry, where suffering is a divine necessity.1 Therefore, the jailer would not be interested in an imminent earthly salvation from death or suffering, but in eternal salvation and acceptance into God’s kingdom. Sōzō presented in this biblical passage has otherworldly implications which allow one to suffer necessarily for the cause of Christ.

34

Handbook of African American Theology

Patricia Cox Miller’s biblical definition of salvation contrasts the term (soter) with a first-century understanding of how Greco-Roman literature often utilized the term. Pagan religious literature would often illustrate a hero offering a libation or offering to the gods for his safe return from a long and tedious journey or strenuous battle. In this sense, salvation implies the deliverance of a person to safety or to a safe place. Compared to the Pauline eschatological vision of a cosmic soter Christ transforming the mortal body into immortal bodies that have been permitted to die without giving the grave the final victory or experiencing the sting associated with death, Miller says: In the one case, the return is to the earthly reality of everyday life at home, while in the other, the “return” is ethereal, out of this world and into some other where the physical threat of death carries no “sting.” Between these extremes lies a third understanding of salvation, one in which the “safe return” is understood as a conscious awareness of dwelling in an invisible “safe place” in the midst of everyday earthly reality.”2

To the contrary, Bishop Walters utilized the soteriological phrase because of the hostile forces that conspired against the possibility of black folk experiencing a “safe place” during the post-Reconstruction era. He was consciously aware of the widespread biblioliteracy of his late nineteenth and early twentieth century audience, who would easily understand the substitution of “we” rather than “I” in the scripture. Black folk residing in in the twenty-first century United States are not a monolithic group of Christians who have read or have interest in the Holy Bible. And yet, the landslide election of Donald J. Trump as the President of the United States on November 8, 2016 was an ominous reality check that black folk in the United States would need to reimagine salvation, that is, a “safe place” to live, to work, and to thrive under a Trumpian presidency.3 Donald Trump’s early campaign messaging trumpeted the divisive and fearful techniques tirelessly employed by previous Republican candidates for president. Mainstream media provided twenty-four-hour coverage of his shocking comments that referred to Mexicans as criminals and rapists, the pre-Civil Rights era as the good old days when black people could be brutalized randomly, Muslims as terrorists, and women as sexual objects who would let you “get away” with sexual assault if you were a celebrity. He survived as a political candidate because of the Southern strategy that he employed to attract white conservatives who predominantly reside in the “red states,” those former Confederate States engaged in Civil War with the United States over the issue of holding black people in perpetual enslavement.4 Republicans in the “red states” form the political base that enthusiastically rallies around Trump’s agenda which is characterized by xenophobia, nationalism, fiscal conservatism, and race-baiting, expressed in phrases such as “lowering taxes,” “law and order,” and “states’ rights,” and ultimately summed up in his slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Alt-right ultranationalists and white supremacists who had felt stymied and constrained during the Obama presidency found an ally and a supporter in Trump. Contrarily, women, progressives, people of color, and immigrants found themselves stunned and seeking for models of resistance and a “safe place” or (for the purpose of this essay) for salvation.

Salvation, White Supremacy, and Black Agency

35

This essay briefly acknowledges the debate in the field of New Testament biblical studies regarding the valuation of the individual and individualism in early Christianity pertaining to the role of faith in soteriology. Gary Burnett’s Paul and the Salvation of the Individual presses the claim that salvation is attained by an individual’s faith, regardless of their corporate, ethnic, or communal allegiances, and it is individualism that “throws the spotlight on the individual and his or her personal response.”5 Burnett is not without critics. A scathing review of his work was submitted by Robert Keay who concluded that Burnett’s work did not adequately demonstrate a working definition of the term “individual,” which limited the scope of his project. “The covenanted, corporate, communal nature of faith surfaces repeatedly in the discussion of the relevant texts and Burnett is well aware of this as his discussion of faith in the OT reveals . . . yet he steadfastly refuses to allow these texts to ‘deflect’ him from his purpose and influence him from his understanding of the individual as viewed in Scripture and in Paul.”6

Salvation during Reconstruction Bishop Walters’s initial question appealed to the dimension of the “covenanted, corporate communal nature of faith” in the quest for the salvation of persons of African descent newly freed after the defeat of the Confederacy with the surrender of General Sherman to Lt. Gen. Ulysses Grant in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. In fact, a community of approximately four million persons of African descent required urgent assistance to ameliorate their immediate situation of destitution and deprivation due to their former condition of chattel enslavement. Walters writes: The answer came quickly and decisively—Educate—Improve our morals—Get money—and the Party of Lincoln that had added the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Federal Constitution will see that we get our Civil and Political Rights. For it had promised them to us. We forthwith proceeded to educate; to improve our morals; and to get money. And we indeed made astonishing progress.7

The progress that the former enslaved persons made to become equipped as independent human beings and informed citizens began with faith and continued with education and often led to entrepreneurship. Robert C. Morris’s Readin, Ritin and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 and Ronald Butchard’s Southern Blacks, Northern Blacks and Freedmen’s Education in the South, 1862–1875, analyze the social context of the freedmen schools and the educators and students who supported them. This investment in education would serve blacks well in the long term, but have little effect on the tumultuous turn of events that would turn the socio-political fortunes of the newly freed persons upside down in short order. Walters’s description of the stark abandonment that Negroes experienced at the dawn of the post-Reconstruction era began with the election of Rutherford Hayes in 1876 and the subsequent withdrawal of Federal troops in the South. It swelled with a

36

Handbook of African American Theology

wave of legislation in Southern State houses and Federal Supreme Court decisions that turned back the civil and human rights acquired when the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed by a Republican controlled Congress.8 He displayed pastoral concern for a community that was in imminent danger of physical annihilation. “The protection which had been given us in the South and without which it was utterly impossible for us to retain our Civil and Political Rights, had been withdrawn; hence we were left exposed to the wrath of our enemies.”9 By 1898, race relations in North Carolina were at their lowest point, due to the growing resentment among whites who experienced significant economic decline and political marginalization across the conquered South during Reconstruction. During this time, many Northerners, pejoratively called “carpetbaggers,” arrived in Wilmington to profit from the rebuilding efforts of the city. Wilmington, more than any other city in North Carolina, also boasted of an influential group of politically astute African Americans who were committed Republicans. In particular, Wilmington, North Carolina, the largest city in the state, was situated on a port, its locale and dependence upon commercial import/export made it the second most important port for the Confederacy after Charleston, South Carolina, to move military supplies for their regiments. Near the end of the Civil War, Union and Confederate soldiers plundered Wilmington, and the Confederate soldiers burned the city. Because of its strategic importance to the national economy, the Union military and the business communities worked quickly to rebuild its infrastructure. The efforts paid off and Wilmington’s economy and population rebounded quickly during Reconstruction.10 The port city became wealthy and politically controlled by Republican politicians as a spoil of the Civil War. The black population of Wilmington would swell to become the largest in the state, and accrue enough capital to wield considerable political influence. Astonishingly, Reconstruction effectively ended in North Carolina shortly after the withdrawal of federal troops. The consequences became starkly evident during the election of 1876, when the Conservative Democrat party assumed executive and legislative control of North Carolina in 1877.11 Their control was short-lived because of the economic downturn fueled by the Panics of 1873 and 1893.12 A successful approach of Fusion politics between the Republican and white Populist political parties emerged in North Carolina. This Fusion approach was successful because Marion Butler, the leader of the Populists, convinced the white farmers of North Carolina to ignore issues of race and focus solely on the slumping late-nineteenth-century economy and its devastated agricultural sector. The interracial alliance committed to advance public education, protect the right to vote, and curb corporate power. The Fusion political platform resulted in gaining state, county, and city electoral victories that effectively defeated Democrat opponents in 1894 and 1896. In 1894, Marion Butler was elected to the North Carolina Senate. The election of 1896 resulted in successful Republican and Populist contests in North Carolina and especially Wilmington. As a result of the new election laws, more voters turned out in predominantly African American counties. Although still a factor in the election, the Populist Party suffered losses in overall numbers of voters in the 1896 election as compared to the numbers that turned out in 1894. The primary reason for the decline was Populists returning to either

Salvation, White Supremacy, and Black Agency

37

the Republican or Democratic Parties instead of maintaining loyalty to the third party. The General Assembly featured 72 Republicans, 64 Populists, 33 Democrats, and one Silverite. Among the assembly members were eight African Americans.13

The election of 1898 The stinging defeats ensured that the Democrats were determined to win back legislative control of the state at all costs. The 1898 election season opened with Republican and Populist leaders losing control of the Fusion movement. Both parties were fractured because of Governor Daniel L. Russell’s inability to satisfy both sides. The resulting failure of Fusion spurred the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party.14

They immediately appointed Furnifold M. Simmons as the Chair of the Democrat Party. Simmons’s vision toward Democrat victory in North Carolina was simple: frame Republican politicians as corrupt and use the Negro vote as the symbol to galvanize white voters. According to one contemporary, Josephus Daniels, a leading Democrat, Simmons was successful because he understood how to recruit volunteers for the cause. Simmons recruited men who “knew how to write, knew how to speak, and knew how to ride.”15 Wilmington’s large population, its wealth as a port city, and its influential black population, was the most coveted prize for the Democrats. The Democrat opposition began with the monied business people of Wilmington. Identified as the “Secret Nine,” nine members of the Chamber of Commerce organized and agreed to work alongside the Democrats’ statewide white supremacy movement for the 1898 election.16 Simmons’s use of the media was unprecedented. The men who could write filled the state newspapers with editorials using phrases like “Negro domination” and “white supremacy” to stoke passions of white voters across the political spectrum. Charismatic speakers were sent out on the “stump” to get out the Democrat voters and convince white Populist voters to align with them. Those who could “ride,” the nightriders, and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members were recruited to ride on horseback and intimidate black and white Republicans and white Populists who were Fusionists. Democrats began to construct the narrative that Wilmington (the state’s largest city) was governed by corrupt Populists and Republicans due to the support of a large black population that exercised their right to vote. Simmons made Wilmington the center of his efforts, claiming that the city was under “negro domination” and it was imperative for whites to combine their efforts and support “white supremacy” to reinstate good government. Among the men who could speak, a star was rising among the leading Democrats in Wilmington. Charles Aycock, the future governor, proclaimed that the city was “the center of the white supremacy movement.” In his speeches, the term “white supremacy” was weaponized and repeatedly used in newspapers to instill fear on whites over the “negro domination” that had taken place in their beloved Wilmington community.

38

Handbook of African American Theology

The fevered political campaign of 1898 took a turn for the worse in August. Simmons wrote a public letter to Senator Pritchard claiming that hundreds of political offices in the state were held by blacks, and published it with the actual numbers in the proDemocrat newspapers. He emphasized that the strongest power of the Negroes was in Craven and New Haven counties and the cities of New Bern, Wilmington, and Greenville. The Wilmington Messenger published the Simmons letter on August 15, 1898 and proceeded to list the offices in its city held by blacks. In Wilmington, 4 Negro aldermen, 4 Negro deputy sheriffs, Negro County Coroner, Negro Register of Deed, Negro Town Constable, 40 Negro City and County Magistrates, 13 Negro City police officers, a large number of Negro attorneys, and John C. Dancy, Negro Collector of Customs who employed John C. Taylor as his deputy collector.

The most prestigious political office held by a black politician in North Carolina during this time was not an elected office, but one filled by presidential appointment. In 1891, Republican President Benjamin Harrison appointed the Rev. John Dancy of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church to the post of Collector of Customs at the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. This federal position came with a salary that was much higher than that of the governor of the state, and controlled several salaried positions beneath it. By 1898, Dancy was in his second term as a federal appointee, having been reappointed under President McKinley. His influential role was expected to get out the Republican vote, reward those who supported the ticket, and punish his Democratic opponents. He and Alex Manly, the biracial editor of the Daily Record, Wilmington’s only black newspaper, would become the target of the Democratic strategy of 1898. Alex Manly wrote an article to rebut a speech made by Rebecca L. Felton, a Democratic white woman in Georgia. Felton made an impassioned plea in which she supported lynching and urged white men to take up firearms to protect white farm girls from being raped by Negro brutes.17 Manly’s response countered her claim regarding interracial sexual relationships. His article stated that Felton should understand that some white women are actually attracted to Negro males and willingly enter into consenting interracial relationships. Moreover, he added that she should teach her white men better sexual mores and to refrain from raping black women. The bombshell article was written in August, but the Democrats waited until the fall of 1898 to use it to exploit the psychosexual tension it revealed. Further to the point, they used Manly’s article to provoke white people into a higher frenzy by insinuating that it sullied the character of good Christian white men and women. Prior to the November election, the Manly article was published in all of the pro-Democrat newspapers and was the center of the speeches of the Democrats making the rounds on the stump. They threatened to take his life and destroy his printing press. Further still, the riders were openly threatening violence to any black or Republican who dared to vote on Election Day. By September, the climate was so heated that Dancy as the leader of the black Republicans in North Carolina publicly denounced the Manly article and stated that he crossed the line when he insulted the virtue of white womanhood. Perhaps Dancy

Salvation, White Supremacy, and Black Agency

39

understood the murderous nature of the opposition better than many others. The issue of race had effectively frightened and united the whites, and the blacks did not have enough allies or influence to change the narrative. As the election drew near, the paramilitary Red Shirts continued to menace and intimidate voters by interrupting black church services and Republican meetings. Several appeals to the president for federal troops to secure safe electoral process were ignored.18 The rallying cry of Alfred Moore Waddell, former officer in the Confederacy and charismatic Democrat stump speaker from Wilmington, came on the eve of Election Day. Waddell reminded white voters of their duty. The night before the election, Waddell reminded the armed throng: You are Anglo-Saxons. You are armed and prepared, and you will do your duty. If you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns.

The promise of violence worked. Denied the protection of federal troops, many Republicans, black and white, stayed home on November 8, 1898. Therefore, Democrats handily won political control of North Carolina once again. The Wilmington Democrats were not satisfied with mere political victory, they wanted to rid the city of its influential elected Republican and black leadership. John Dancy and Alex Manly had already fled the city before the election occurred. The morning of November 9, headlines of newspapers across North Carolina declared the decisive victory by the Democrat party. The Wilmington Messenger announced a special meeting for all white men to attend that morning at the courthouse at 10:00. During the special meeting, Waddell read a “White Declaration of Independence,” written by the Secret Nine, containing eight resolutions concerning white political domination, white labor, banning publication of the Record, and the banishment of Alex Manly. Additional resolutions targeted Mayor Silas P. Wright and the Board of Aldermen and called for their resignations. A committee of twenty-five persons, led by Waddell, was appointed to carry out the resolutions. The resolutions demanded that the city government filled with Republicans, Fusionists, and blacks promptly resign, that Alex Manly be banished for life from Wilmington and that prominent blacks and white Republicans leave town immediately. After two days of gunfire, where bloodthirsty white militia consisting of Red Shirts, Rough Riders, and other civilian militia left Manley’s building and printing press destroyed, up to 60 blacks killed, and three whites wounded, every one of the resolutions was met.19 Alfred Moore Waddell was elected the new mayor of Wilmington with a solid Democrat Board of Aldermen. The entire police force, beginning with the chief, was forced to resign. All positions were filled with white Democrats. By November 12, 1898 the new Democrat leadership was firmly in power in the city of Wilmington. White supremacy was victorious. Scholars have begun to call the scandalous event what it really was, “the only coup d’état in the history of the United States.” A freely elected municipal governing body was forced out of office by Southern Democratic gun-toting thugs. Salvation or deliverance to a safe place for the blacks who accomplished the salvific program that Bishop Walters and other black leaders had prescribed for the safety of

40

Handbook of African American Theology

the race during Reconstruction was nonexistent in the climate of terror that sparked the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, yet blacks continued to agitate and press their claims for equality under the law. On November 1, 1898, foreseeing calamity, Bishop Walters records that the newly formed Afro-American Council organized and adopted principles and objectives as follows: report on all lynchings, examine the constitutionality of the laws designed to oppress “Afro-Americans”; promote the work of securing legislation that will grant all citizens the rights guaranteed them by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. The council was committed to the work of prison reform, black migration from the terror-filled South, industrial and higher education curriculum and business enterprise among all blacks. The objects also include moral elevation of the AfroAmerican people and urging the appropriation of federal funding for education of blacks denied schooling due to discrimination.20

History is a witness that these objectives were implemented by the Executive Committee of the Afro-American Council and the members through their respective churches, schools, social organizations, and professional obligations. Scholars such as Wells and Ransom and W.E.B. DuBois were preeminent participants in what Gary Dorrien argues is the Black Social Gospel Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.21 Salvation was experienced in the safe places of the black church, the black school, and the black family, all of which served as sanctuary where black folk were reminded of their value, their potential, and their power as children of God.

The state of black America between the Obama and Trump eras The twenty-first-century African American experience is as disparate as the identity politics that dot the political landscape of the United States. The dissolution of the “village” during the 1970s and 1980s has been analyzed by the best minds among the intelligentsia of African American scholarship centered in the humanities. Popular political pundit Eugene Robinson’s book Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America depicts the once cohesive black community as one fragmented into four groups: mainstream, the middle-class majority determined to acquire the American dream; abandoned, a minority crushed by poverty, addiction, and dysfunction; transcendent, a very small group of elitists with such opulence and power that whites pay homage; and emergent, two emerging groups comprised of biracial individuals and recent black immigrants, both groups reinterpreting what “black” is supposed to mean. The four groups are distinguished from each other by worldviews, hopes, aspirations, dreams, and fears. Robinson’s book was published in 2010, halfway into the first Obama presidential term. The election of Donald J. Trump has moved the needle of social relations within the fragmented black community toward solidity, albeit in a new form. Any soteriology that provides a safe place for black folk in the age of Trump must embrace the intersectionality, hybridity, and fluidity about issues of race, class, sexuality,

Salvation, White Supremacy, and Black Agency

41

privilege, and gender within the range of human experience that may be best articulated by gnostic rather than orthodox forms of Christianity. Traditionally, historians of Religious Studies have presented gnosticism through the second- and third-century writings of proto-orthodox apologists such as Irenaeus and others of that ilk who rebuked the gnostics as heretics. Consequently gnostic writings were dismissed, discounted, and ordered to be destroyed. Until the Nag Hammadi discovery of gnostic texts in 1945, religious scholars had no material to examine gnostic writings outside of what their enemies quoted from them. Karen King argues that the historic view of Gnostic Christianity that simplistically pits orthodoxy against heresy is not helpful for understanding what she calls earlier forms of Christianity. In What is Gnosticism? King offers an alternative to understanding particular Nag Hammadi texts by exploring questions of how early Christians attempted to form their religious identity in the religious pluralism of the Roman Empire, and how one might reconsider presuppositions regarding Christian origins.22 Gnostic writings present numerous individual and communal approaches to salvation by centering the process as an enlightening experience of seeking and acquiring esoteric knowledge about God, Christ, evil, the world, the self and the other. When the sinful state of ignorance is destroyed, one has attained salvation. A useful method to explore salvation as a safe place for black folk in the age of Trump that embraces gnosis, or esoteric knowledge, is through music. In his book Empower The People: Social Ethics for the African American Church, Theodore Walker, Jr. devotes a section in chapter 5 to “The Witness of the Music.” In that section, Walker declares that the black church must appropriate the philosophy of black power to transform the malevolent, misogynistic, uninspired and unimaginative music marketed to the African American community. Once the witness through the music to black power is reimagined, the African American Church should be able to effectively mediate Christ’s salvation to the African American community.23 The Robert Glasper Experiment (RGE) released two projects in 2012 and 2013 with four musicians, three of them rooted in the black church. The experience of playing as young teens in the black church forced them to become comfortable with rhythm changes, spontaneity, and innovation in a charismatic environment. These men were intuitively trained as musicians long before they took a class on musical theory. Their introductory projects, Black Radio and Black Radio 2, span the genres of gospel, jazz, rock, R&B, and Hip Hop – interpreted through nuanced historical, theoretical, and practical knowledge of black music. In an interview, Glasper says, “It’s the most popular, the most loved, the most emulated, and it’s our music. All of the musical genres that persons around the world gravitate toward are rooted in the African experience in the New World. Rock, Blues, Jazz, and Hip Hop it’s all black music.”24 The band is uniquely situated due to their chronology and their training. They are all part of the hip hop generation, yet they are all trained jazz musicians. Members of the RGE strategically combat ignorance and lower level musicianship that drives material success in the music industry with excellent technique and integrity rooted in organic authenticity. The band’s gospel roots and training in Straight Jazz with Hip Hop influences cause even their re-interpretations of grunge rock, alternative metal, to transcend adolescent angst to adult affirmation and acceptance of the melancholy and morose.

42

Handbook of African American Theology

It is no coincidence that RGE projects were released just as the first courses in Afrofuturism began to be offered on a few undergraduate campuses.25 Black Radio opens with “Lift Off,” a phrase used to describe the vertical movement that translates a rocket from a lower to a higher position. RGE invited vocalists across the musical spectrum of jazz, hip-hop, and soul and made connections effortlessly through space and time—often easing into loops by DJ Dilla Glasper has stated that while his fan base are jazz fans, he deliberately seeks to expand his clientele, by scheduling concerts in venues that are not associated with jazz music. This intentionality possesses capacity to reconnect the four fragmented groups within the twenty-first century African American community. Making connection in spite of the societal and individual fragmentation that threaten to annihilate our relatedness to the Earth and one another requires commitment to a love ethic.26 RGE projects are conceived and performed with love for music and black people.

Salvation in the Trump era A commitment to love and be loved is necessary for salvation for black folks to occur in the age of Trump. Surviving and thriving under this administration’s merciless tax bill, support of white supremacy, while resisting disenfranchisement under the numerous conservative judical appointments at the federal levels and on Supreme Court, will also require a nuanced socio-political strategy.27 Salvation for this generation must be centered in an approach that allows individuals, families and communities to cultivate love and knowledge of God, self, community, craft, and purpose.28 Robert Glasper’s musicality speaks in a new musical voice that is helpful for understanding how the black church might integrate ancient rebellious voices of the Pre-Constantinian church. Therefore, a soteriological model in the dystopian age of Trump challenges orthodox definitions, practices and representations of salvation presented historically by the black church, while creating safe spaces where black people commit to love and knowledge of God, self, and other, a subtle return to gnostic teaching previously condemned and subverted for over a millennium. By providing musical connection to one’s past, present, and future, RGE’s knowledge of one’s self, surrounding, ancestors, legacy, and talent results in a listener’s transportation to a safe place formed and sustained to counter intergenerational trauma with relationality, love, and affirmation.

Notes 1 2

Carl R. Holladay, “Acts,” The Harper Collins Bible Commentary (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 2000), 988. Patricia Cox Miller, “ ‘All the Words Were Frightful’: Salvation by Dreams in the Shepherd of Hermas,” Vigiliae Christianae 42, no. 4 (1988): 327–38. doi:10.2307/1584281. 327.

Salvation, White Supremacy, and Black Agency 3

43

In 1975, the Trump real estate firm was sued for housing discriminatory practices against minorities. Trump countersued, claiming reverse racism by the federal government and welfare abuse by African Americans as a defense. The case was thrown out and Trump agreed to comply with federal government guidelines to advertise and show vacant apartments to minorities. In 1989, as a real estate mogul from New York City, Trump spent $85,000 for a full page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five black and Latino males called the Central Park Five who were accused of attacking and raping a white woman in the park. DNA evidence proved their innocence but even after their release from false imprisonment Donald Trump never issued an apology, but instead doubled down on his original statement. See https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/opinion/why-trump-doubled-down-onthe-central-park-five.html. Most recently, Donald Trump has been the proponent of the birther movement, the group of persons that challenged President Barack Obama’s ability to govern because of his not having been born in the United States of America. Trump is the embodiment of white resentment of black success that followed the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. 4 John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, and Lee Atwater, who served as George H.W. Bush’s campaign strategist, explained how after the 1960s openly racist language against blacks had to be coded. Southern whites came to understand that certain phrases (e.g., the war on drugs, law and order, state’s rights, and fiscal conservatism) ensured white supremacy. 5 Gary W. Burnett, Paul and the Salvation of the Individual (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2001), 165. 6 Book review by Robert Keay, Journal of Biblical Literature 121, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), 777–80, (accessed December 19, 2017.) 7 Bishop Alexander Walters, My Life and Work (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1917), 95. 8 The resistance to federally enforced Reconstruction in the defeated Confederacy initially took shape differently in various states. As early as 1866 in the state of North Carolina, and throughout the defeated South, the first Jim Crow laws mimicking the slave codes were passed by the legislature. The Slaughterhouse Cases that prompted the 1873 Supreme Court decision that narrowly defined the 14th Amendment by determining a distinction between federal and state rights were the first indication that the federal government would not adequately enforce the Reconstruction Amendments. The 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision upholding segregation affirmed the Jim Crow legislation that deprived blacks of basic constitutional rights as citizens of the United States. 9 Walters, My Life, 95–6. 10 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission Final Report, May 31, 2006, pp. 41–2, (accessed December 12, 2017.) This exhaustive and comprehensive report consists of eight chapters with an introduction. The report includes 16 appendices and a bibliography that is described as partial, but is actually very detailed. 11 Ibid., 25, footnote 93. The “negro question” became a real factor in the 1876 election because Democratic candidates developed their first cohesive rebuttals to the Republican Party and did not attempt to “placate” black voters in their platforms. The 1876 election was also one of the first campaigns in which the Democratic Party encouraged its candidates to visit voters throughout their constituencies and “stump” for votes throughout the campaign.

44

Handbook of African American Theology

12 The economic panic of 1873–9 was partially caused by the demonetization of silver supporting the economies of Germany and the United States, as well as by the effects of inflation after the Civil War. The depression of 1893 was an important economic event that saw unemployment rise to 10 percent and stay there for over five years. It was accompanied by business contraction, violent labor strikes, the climax of the Populist and free silver political crusades, new political alliances, national transformation of economic and social policy, and far-reaching intellectual developments in the nation’s academies. 13 Ibid., 41–2, (accessed December 12, 2017.) 14 Ibid., 56, (accessed December 12, 2017.) 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. Appendix N, “Timeline,” 430, (accessed December 12, 2017.) 17 The post-Reconstruction era was marked by thousands of lynchings throughout the South. It is estimated that from 1882 to 1892 over 1,400 Negroes were lynched. Countless unknown numbers before 1882 are yet to be documented. However, these shocking numbers, along with the growing terror of Southern whites toward blacks, were enough reason for Bishop Walters to sound the alarm in August of 1898 and announce that it was time for the leaders of blacks across the nation to organize a new organization to replace the defunct Afro-American League and rename it the National Afro-American Council. 18 The United States entered the Spanish–American War in April of 1898, shortly after the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba. Some historians surmise that this may have been part of the reason for the failure to send federal troops to keep the peace. Several regiments were called up from North Carolina, among which a black troop was on its way when the NC elections were held. Had the armed black regiment been in the state during the election of 1898, the race riot may have had an altogether different ending. 19 The tally of the total number of blacks killed has never been completely recorded. Eyewitnesses testify of seeing hundreds of dead bodies of black men, women and children scattered within the forest near the Cape Fear River, shot dead as they fled for their lives. 20 Walters, My Life, 112–13. 21 Gary Dorrien’s books, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel and Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel, present his two-volume argument on this movement. 22 Karen King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 23 Theodore Walker, Jr., Empower the People: A Social Ethics for the African-American Church (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2001). 24 Two interviews provide insight into Glasper’s musicality: “Rolling Stone Short

Film: In Conversation with Robert Glasper.” During this interview with Glasper in South Africa he lists all genres of music created by African Americans, beloved and adopted by people worldwide. The second is, Robert Glasper Experiment at

Schemes and Dreams Foundation Sound Education Series 800 East Atlanta. Interview with Robert Glasper Experiment where the band’s members express their intent to broaden and deepen the black community’s exposure to the genres of black music. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=robert+glasper+interview&&view=detail&m id, (accessed December 19, 2017.) 25 Afrofuturism is defined as an intersection of imagination, technology, future and liberation for black people. See Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013).

Salvation, White Supremacy, and Black Agency

45

26 bell hooks writes that “Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth. Only love can give us the power to reconcile, to redeem the power to renew weary spirits and save lost souls” in Salvation, Black People and Love (New York: Morrow, 2001), 16–17. 27 In the November 2017 elections, blacks were elected to political offices across North Carolina. The cities of Charlotte and Salisbury each elected their first African American woman mayor. 28 Luna Milbroux, “Why More Young Black People Are Trading In Church for African Spirituality.” Splinter (December 18, 2017), https://splinternews.com/why-moreyoung-black-people-are-trading-in-church-for-a-1821316608 (accessed December 19, 2017).

4

Engaging History Theologically: Early Afro-Pentecostal Interracial Communities as Sites of Emancipatory Politics David D. Daniels

While black emancipatory ecclesial spaces populate the black theological horizon, is there a place for black-led religious interracial emancipatory ecclesial spaces? Does black-led religious interraciality generate a usable history for theological interrogation? Black theology and religious history continue to probe the emancipatory sites within all-black Christianity in critical and productive ways, from slave religion to the long civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. Does space exist in the scholarly production to probe the emancipatory sites of black-led interracial religious communities such as those related to the interracial communities that constituted a forward-looking sector within early Afro-Pentecostalism? As we move towards the year 2040 with its anticipated demographic shift within the United States when the population switches from majority white to majority people of color, can scholars theologize about the black-led interracial religious communities which are forerunners of this shift? These black-led interracial communities annunciate ways to lead societies whose demographics appear similar to the ones projected for 2040. These communities experimented with innovative ways of black-led interracial governing and relating that might be deemed post-racist. These communities anticipated a post-white majority, and, possibly, post-racist future in the United States where power might be shared between the races and peoples; they demonstrated over a century ago that black-led interracialism, at least in a religious form, was achievable.1 Black-led interracialism shifts the focus from the long study of white-led interracialism in which the reception of racial minorities within majority white institutions is the topic. Studies on white-led interracialism keep the focus on the power garnered by whites and adjustments they make or fail to make to include racial minorities into white-led institutions. A concurrent theme of such studies is the plight of minorities among the majority and the degrees of exclusion experienced by minorities. The shift from whiteled to black-led religious interracialism during the era of legal racial segregation registers that these two forms of interracialism do not mirror each other. In the same way that the black Protestantism is not the counterpart of the white Protestantism, neither is blackled religious interracialism the counterpart to white-led religious interracialism, because they differ in how they engage the racial hierarchies of authority.

48

Handbook of African American Theology

During the early twentieth century, white Protestantism replicated the dominant racial subordination of African Americans under white supremacy with its “Negro conference” and judicatories (when African American individuals and congregations were allowed to join at all); white Protestantism erected racial barriers to African Americans on pastorates and bishoprics. Black Protestantism, however, welcomed all races; in Afro-Pentecostalism all races did join various denominations during the first decades of the movement. While white Protestantism reproduced the racial hierarchies of authority by erecting structures of racial exclusion, black Protestantism did not; rather, black Protestantism erected structures of racial inclusion. The black Protestantism functioned as a “counter-public” that was “distinct from and in conflict with the dominant white society and its racist institutional structures” and resisted reproducing the dominant racial order with its racial hierarchies of authority. With its separatist and interracialist thrusts, black Protestantism envisioned a post-racist church and society. Early twentieth-century Afro-Pentecostal interracial organizations were post-racist in resisting the existing racial hierarchies of authority.2 Among the forms of black Protestantism where interracial membership constitutes a sector of the black church is Afro-Pentecostalism. Thus, a study of black-led interracial Pentecostalism examines a religious movement consisting of organizations, congregations, newspapers, and other institutional forms. It is not merely a study of rhetoric, visions, or ecclesial imaginaries; it also is not simply a study of resistance. It is an examination of the embodiment of a vision within societal structures. It is a study of how black-led interracial Pentecostalism was able to participate in the disrupting, inverting, subverting, and, possibly, transcending of the racial hierarchies of authorities. This becomes fertile space to employ historical and theological inquiries. Theologically, black-led interracial Pentecostalism affirmed racial equality, established interracial organizations, and governed own denominations of people from multiple races, including Latinos, Asian Americans, and First Peoples in addition to blacks and whites. African Americans, drawing deeply from egalitarian theologies, created interracial theologies and ecclesial spaces where interracial inclusion became a mark of the church. Afro-Pentecostalism, both black-led interracial Pentecostalism and wholly African American Pentecostal denominations, emerged over against the white alliance of race and Christianity in which racial subordination and exclusion marked the ecclesiology of white Christianity. Theological investigations of Afro-Pentecostal interracialism as an ecclesial site of emancipatory politics could possibly supply material to advance ethics of resistance, theologies of resistance, theologies of refusal, and ethics of empowerment.3 Hermeneutical tools will be employed to investigate the religious innovations of Afro-Pentecostal interracialism. Tzvetan Todorov and Bonnie Honig offer a repertoire of hermeneutical tools and definitions to analyze these religious innovations. Todorov and Honig will be employed to decode the types of black-led interracial ecclesial communities fostered by Afro-Pentecostalism. This chapter will interrogate historical memory, proposing four ways of interpreting early black-led Pentecostal interracial exchanges. These four interracial religious innovations were ways that the black church has reimagined the role of Christianity in the era of legalized racial segregation and

Early Afro-Pentecostal Interracial Communities

49

anticipated a post-racist church and society. As sites of resistance and emancipatory practices, they provide organic theologies that challenged the racial hierarchy of authority. Countering racial subordination and exclusion, they envisioned a post-racist church and society in which the church operates beyond the racial hierarchies of authority.4

Constructing racial hierarchies of authority Racial hierarchies of authority were described by W.E.B. DuBois, a leading scholar on race, in this manner: “In every possible way it was impressed and advertised that the white was superior and the Negro an inferior race. This inferiority must be publicly acknowledged and submitted to.” DuBois outlined how in racial hierarchies of authority each race was assigned a position of power or a position of submission with the so-called superior race, Euro-Americans, occupying the position of power, and with the so-called inferior race, the Negroes or African Americans, being relegated to the position of submission located on the lower rungs of the hierarchy. The racial hierarchies of authority constituted the racial order. Within the racial hierarchy of authority, African Americans were to recognize and be deferential to whites as the authority in all situations, including the religious realm.5 The racial hierarchies of authority were fueled by a Euro-American will to rule. The “will to power” coupled with military, economic, and political power re-inserted white dominance over African Americans during this era of racial segregation that followed the Reconstruction era. Racial hierarchies of authority are structured by racism. Racism, according to major theorists of race such as William J. Wilson, is the combination of racial privilege, prejudice, and power. Racism requires that one racial group possesses the power to impose its racial prejudices on another group—that it can subordinate another racial group. Racial privilege exists in two forms: unearned entitlement and conferred dominance. Privilege is exclusionary by allotting certain opportunities—economic, political, social, religious—to one group and denying these opportunities to another. Racial power, prejudice, and privilege operated according to specific racial regimes which kept whites as a race at the apex of the hierarchies of authority and made them as a race the primary beneficiaries of US wealth and its geo-political position in the world.6

Hermeneutical maneuvers and racial hierarchies of authority The key hermeneutical texts for this essay are The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre by Tzvetan Todorov, and Bonnie Honig’s Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Todorov’s hermeneutic of the uncanny, fantastic, and marvelous along with Honig’s hermeneutic of the miraculous offer insight into emancipatory politics. Todorov and Honig will be read with broad strokes in order to make distinctions between their respective hermeneutical maneuvers. These four hermeneutics will be employed to interpret early Afro-Pentecostal interracialism with the uncanny proposing

50

Handbook of African American Theology

lunacy, the fantastic proposing liminality, the marvelous proposing subversion, and the miraculous proposing transcendence.7 Todorov and Honig aid us in refocusing our theologizing on and historicizing of early Afro-Pentecostal interracialism during an era when even interracial civil rights agencies like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were predominantly white-led organizations. The hermeneutical strategies of Todorov and Honig will be employed to complicate the analysis of interraciality; at least four types of interraciality existed. They will be deployed to offer insight into the ways that Afro-Pentecostal interracialism resisted the racial order structured by racial hierarchies of authority. The hermeneutical devices of Todorov and Honig will be used to engage these Afro-Pentecostal ecclesiologies of emancipatory politics as disruption, inversion, subversion, and transcendence. Approached from another angle, the question can be framed thus: How were Afro-Pentecostal interracial communities ecclesial sites of emancipatory politics and how did they confront racial hierarchies of authority? For instance, did Afro-Pentecostal uncanniness conjure up their own rules and disrupt the racial hierarchies of authority, liminality prompt flights from the racial zones into refugee camps on the borderlands which inverted racial hierarchies of authority, anarchy subvert the racial hierarchies of authority, or wonder-working initiatives that possibly transcend racial hierarchies of authority?8 Each hermeneutic will be used to demonstrate how early black-led interracial Pentecostalism confronted the racial reasoning of the era that was framed by the concept of the racial hierarchies of authority. It will be argued that early black-led interracial Pentecostalism engaged in more resistance. The four hermeneutics of Todorov and Honig guide inquires which probe how black-led “interracial” ways of governing structured Afro-Pentecostal interracial organizations. According to Todorov, In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know . . . there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.9

Early black-led interracial Pentecostalism, in the words of Todorov, was an historical event that “cannot be explained by the laws” of the era of racial segregation; it reflected a historical reality that could be “controlled by laws unknown,” according to the hermeneutic of the fantastic. Yet, according to the hermeneutic of the uncanny, this event additionally could be a shock to the known racial laws. According to the hermeneutic of the marvelous, it could be interpreted as a supernatural act that suspended known racial laws. And according to Honig’s hermeneutic of the miraculous, it could be an historical event that participated in transcending known racial laws. These hermeneutics will also assist in interpreting authentic post-racist forms of Christian ecclesial life and social existence.10

Early Afro-Pentecostal Interracial Communities

51

During the early twentieth century, the African American Protestant challenge against the alliance of the majority church with the racial order structured by racial hierarchies of authority found expression in different interracial religious innovations. These innovations confronted the solidifying alliance between white Christianity and the emerging racial order marked by the racial segregation of church and society after 1896. During the rise of racial segregation, early twentieth-century black church leaders stated that they were “surprised and astonished at the recent attitude of the church” which had adopted “racial prejudice.” They saw the dominant religion, white Protestantism, cave into white supremacy, elevating their racial identity over their Christian identity. They identified narrowing “the bounds of human brotherhood” and segregating “black men [and women] in some outer sanctuary” as a theological travesty. They judged the ecclesial restructuring of the church around racial hierarchies of authority as “wrong, unchristian and disgraceful.” They sought “the co-operation of all men [and women] of all races,” especially Christians of all races, in the restructuring of the church and society around freedom and justice for all people, regardless of their race; they envisioned the restructuring of the church according to an emancipatory politics.11

Afro-Pentecostal interracial politics of dis-rupture and the hermeneutic of the uncanny A key ecclesial site of emancipatory politics was the Azusa Street Revival that was held at the Apostolic Faith Mission in Los Angeles between 1906 and 1911. During the Revival, a Pentecostal disruption of the racial hierarchy of authority occurred. Led by William J. Seymour, an African American, this interracial revival erupted initially in a small all-black congregation. It became the site of a black-led ecclesial interracial venture where a disruptive grace interrupted the racial order embodying the unity of the church. A central figure within the revival recorded that: There can be no divisions in a true Pentecost. To formulate a separate body is but to advertise failure, as a people of God. It proves to the world that we cannot get along together, rather than causing them to believe in salvation. . . . We are called to bless and serve the whole “body of Christ,” everywhere. Christ is one and His “body” can be but “one.” To divide it is but to destroy it.12

Marked by “a true Pentecost,” the ruptures in the church would be repaired and exclusionary practices would be replaced, according to this vision. With compelling images of the church such as “a true Pentecost,” the “people of God,” and the “body of Christ,” the unity of the church is annunciated and assumed. This vision of unity proclaims that the church lives out its life in ways that differ from the world, a world noted for its disunity and racial divisions, a world framed by racial hierarchies of authority. The black-led interracial unity of the church advances evangelization by “causing” the world, as the above quote noted, “to believe in salvation,” believing in a

52

Handbook of African American Theology

religion that delegitimizes racial hierarchies of authority and possesses the power to erect new structures of authority that do not replicate dominant racial forms.13 These Afro-Pentecostal interracial ecclesial organizations might be registered as uncanny. In a hermeneutic of the uncanny, an interracial community like the Azusa Street Revival can be described as “incredible, extraordinary, [or] shocking” to the dominant racial reasoning and structure; additionally, its organizational behavior might appear as “mad” since lunatics function within society by operating according to what makes sense to them, obeying the rules that govern their “make-believe” worlds, rather than the rules of the “sane” dominant order. Lunatics often clash with the authorities, failing to follow societal rules. Is the interracial “misbehavior” of the people in the Afro-Pentecostal interracial movement a defiant act of racial lunacy? Especially mad were the bizarre interracial customs of Pentecostals, customs which went against the segregation laws in many southern states. This Afro-Pentecostal lunacy was a threat to racial order. Within Afro-Pentecostal interracialism, blacks and whites refused to stay in their assigned racial places; they operated outside their designated racial roles.14 Afro-Pentecostal interracialism as an ecclesial site of emancipatory politics constructed an interracial way of being church that appeared to the dominant racial order as lunacy. Yet, these black-led interracial ecclesial communities spawned on the margins of racial order structured by racial hierarchies of authority a new ecclesial reality. They pointed to a distant ecclesial horizon.

Afro-Pentecostal interracial politics of inversion and the hermeneutic of the fantastic The Pentecostal sector of black-led interracial denominations was also constituted by a set of racial reversals. Resisting the dominant racial pattern of church membership, some white Christians joined black-led Pentecostal congregations. Even some white congregations joined black-led Pentecostal denominations, countering the church polities of the white majority that reproduced racial hierarchies of authority in their church structures and governance. These black congregations and denominations welcomed whites; these white Christians and congregations submitted to the authority of the African American leadership; black and white Pentecostals shared power in these communities. These reversals undergirded this particular black-led interracial Pentecostalism as ecclesial sites of emancipatory politics by circumventing the reproduction of the dominant racial hierarchies of authority. The reversals of black-led Pentecostal interracialism might be registered as fantastic where the fantastic is carnivalesque, resembling the “disorder” of the medieval carnival. In a hermeneutic of the fantastic, black-led interracialism crosses into a liminal space, an in-between space. Liminality violates the racial laws that govern racially demarcated zones for white and black respectively; liminality is a space “controlled by unknown [racial] laws.” These reversals constituted a site of black-led ecclesial interracial innovation where an inversive grace interrupted the racial hierarchies of authority. In these carnivalesque spaces reversals reign.15

Early Afro-Pentecostal Interracial Communities

53

The Church of God in Christ (COGIC) created an ecclesial space that reversed the dominant racial order of white-led denominations where African American congregations were relegated to segregated administrative units or judicatories. While in COGIC African Americans exercised religious authority over a separate conference of white clergy and congregations, this racial arrangement was requested by whites. In these ecclesial spaces, white pastors presided over white congregations in COGIC and a white bishop presided over the white judicatory. However, some whites remained members of black-led interracial congregations. All white Christians in COGIC were subject to the religious authority of the African American-led organization, “inverting” the dominant racial hierarchy of authority. Yet a key distinction must be made. In COGIC the white minority requested a separate conference whereas African Americans in white-led denominations were forced into separate judicatories.16 About twenty years after its founding in 1907, COGIC approved in 1924 the resolution drafted by white COGIC clergy and congregations to adopt a Protestant model, establishing a white minority judicatory to unite the white congregations across North America that belonged to COGIC. The white leaders and congregations resided in Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. This development was in response to the argument of white clergy who strove to minimize the anomaly of white congregations in a black denomination. By being a racial minority conference within the larger system, they sought to maximize their presence by uniting under a white judicatory.17 The COGIC inversion of the racial hierarchies of authority could be construed as liminality in that COGIC occupied an ecclesial borderland that operated outside the racial zones of regulated religion, occupying the “unregulated” territory along the border between the two racial zones. In inverting the racial hierarchies of authority, COGIC did not merely flip the pyramid. It supported white interracial “separatists,” creating a new option for white and black interracialists in the racial order.

Afro-Pentecostal interracial politics of subversion and the hermeneutic of the marvelous Instead of the uncanny or the fantastic, Afro-Pentecostal interracialism as an ecclesial site of emancipatory politics could be registered as marvelous. In a hermeneutic of the marvelous, a black-led interracial organization is subversive within the racial order because known racial laws can be suspended; the marvelous is anarchic. An interracial movement of the marvelous is a rebellious, treasonous, insurgent, or riotous space; racial norms and reasoning are suspended; the racial order is subverted. As a rebellion against the racial laws that sustain racial hierarchies of authority, a black-led interracial Pentecostalism is an ecclesial site where a subversive grace conspires against the racial order: Afro-Pentecostal interracialism, as racial anarchy, subverts the racial regime of white rule.18 The Holy Nazarene Tabernacle Church of the Apostolic Faith was a woman-led interracial Pentecostal denomination, founded by Bishop Mattie Thornton, which

54

Handbook of African American Theology

subverted the racial hierarchies of authority by erecting ecclesial structures where white clergy and members were subject to the episcopal authority of an African American clergywoman. Thus, this denomination challenged patriarchy and white rule. It engaged in a double subversion as the black race and female gender moved off the lower rungs of the racial hierarchies of authority within this denomination.19 Established in 1908 as a predominantly black religious organization, the Holy Nazarene Tabernacle Church of the Apostolic Faith was headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. It was also part of the Pentecostal Sabbatarian movement, professing Saturday as the Sabbath and not Sunday, and believed that people of African descent were black Hebrews. In this way, it was a triple subversion of the racial order structured by white rule, patriarchy, and white normative Protestantism. It also annunciated a post-racist, post-patriarchal, post-white normative Protestant future.20

Afro-Pentecostal interracial politics of transcendence and the hermeneutic of the miraculous Instead of the uncanny, the fantastic, or the marvelous, Afro-Pentecostal interrracialism as an ecclesial site of emancipatory politics might be registered as miraculous since the miraculous glimpses the transcendent. In a hermeneutic of the miraculous, a religious movement such as Afro-Pentecostal interracialism could be deemed as transcending known racial laws of a racial order structure by racial hierarchies of authority. It could be an ecclesial space of transcending grace. The Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW) began in 1907 as a black-led interracial organization that became predominantly white in 1916 and equally divided between black and white clergy around 1923. During 1924, it became majority African American when the majority of the nearly 500 white clergy exited the denomination. However, a number of white-led congregations, black-led interracial congregations, and all-black congregations remained. In 1925 the then predominantly African American, albeit interracial, denomination elected Garfield T. Haywood, an African American, as presiding bishop; he had previously served for more than a decade as the executive secretary. By 1931, the bishopric of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World was interracial: four African Americans and three white Americans. The denomination sponsored interracial national conventions in northern cities which included white delegates from the South. The Pentecostal Assemblies of the World as an interracial organization inaugurated the practice of consecrating a white clergyman as bishop every time an African American clergyman was elevated to the bishopric in order to preserve its ideal of interracial leadership. By creating a more racially inclusive denomination through these ecclesial practices, they strove to transcend racial hierarchies of authority.21 According to Bonnie Honig, “a miracle is neither purely exceptional or purely temporal. It occurs in time and but also out of time.” Afro-Pentecostal interracialism as movement of the miraculous offers a glimpse of the horizon, a reality envisioning religious exchanges that escape the marks of the racial order structure by racial

Early Afro-Pentecostal Interracial Communities

55

hierarchies of authority. This organizational feat is more than an engagement of imaginaries; it depicts an alternative organizational life where people interact in ways that exceed how their respective races operate according to the dominant racial laws. The religious order might engage race as one of various social markers such as it would engage doctrine, gender, language, diaspora, etc. Race, then, is among the ensemble of religious markers. By transcending the racial hierarchies of authority, early black-led interracial Pentecostalism possibly transcended the dominant racial laws.22

Towards an ecclesial investigation of Afro-Pentecostal emancipatory politics and interraciality Afro-Pentecostal emancipatory politics entailed whites as the dominant race within the racial hierarchy of authority voluntarily displacing themselves from that position. The displacement involved addressing power dynamics. The black Pentecostal leaders and congregations that received white leaders and clergy into their denomination practiced interracial politics that challenged the racial politics of African American subordination that shaped the ethic of servility imposed by whites as a race upon African Americans. Afro-Pentecostal emancipatory politics acknowledged that African Americans possessed the God-given authority to govern and exercised jurisdiction over white religious affairs. It involved power-sharing. African American Pentecostal interracial leaders had to figure out the degree of authority that they should share with their white clergy, and the four types of interracial Afro-Pentecostalism differed on this. Blacks and whites also had to learn to co-lead across racial lines, regardless of the degree of authority shared.23 Afro-Pentecostal emancipatory politics involved various theological maneuvers. First, it ceased making the society in the image of the white or black race and forcing other races to fit into their creation. Second, it dispossessed itself of the notion that one race was the “owner of truth and knowledge” and deemed other races as exemplifying “ignorance.” Third, by becoming open to the gifts and contributions of each other’s race, it acknowledged the limits to each respective race’s knowledge; it called for each race to join the others in “attempting, together, to learn more than” each race knew separately. Fourth, as noted above, it affirmed the ecclesial right of African Americans to govern themselves and other races.24 Striving to be Christian communities of grace where all people were welcomed, many African American denominations became religious communities that were open to all. The theological grounding for a black-led interracial Pentecostalism was based on the doctrines of a common creation of all people, a common image of God in all people, a church for all people, and the “equality of the races” to govern themselves and whites, especially exercising this right over white religious affairs. Herein, these four maneuvers flattened the racial hierarchy of authority: all races operate as peers. Drawing on Bakhtin, the Afro-Pentecostal interracialism as an ecclesial site of emancipatory politics can be deemed to have birthed “a second world and second life outside officialdom,” outside the dominant racial order with its racial hierarchies of authority.25

56

Handbook of African American Theology

Conclusion As “a second world and second life” outside racial hierarchies of authority, AfroPentecostal interracialism exhibits grace that is disruptive, inversive, subversive, and transcending. Striving to be Christian communities of grace where all people were welcomed, these interracial black-led denominations became religious communities that were open to all. The theological grounding for this black-led interracial Pentecostalism was based on the doctrines of a common creation of all people, a common image of God in all people, a church for all people, the “equality of the races,” and a grace that can generate ecclesial realities that are possibly post-racist. Afro-Pentecostal interracialism challenged the racial hierarchies of authority through which white “will to power” was lodged. The four hermeneutical maneuvers— uncanny, fantastic, marvelous, miraculous—complexified and nuanced the diversity within Afro-Pentecostal interraciality. The four types of interracial Afro-Pentecostalism can be deemed ecclesial sites of emancipatory politics where racial disruption, inversion, subversion, and transcendence engage racial hierarchies of authority and offer new ecclesial realities. Black-led interracial Afro-Pentecostalism provides a usable past to envision the future. These communities anticipated a post-white majority, and, possibly, post-racist future where power might be shared between the races and peoples within a majority people-of-color society. It offers ecclesial sites of emancipatory politics that can populate an expanding black theological horizon.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

See James Cone, The Spiritual and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972); Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990); Leah Gunning Francis, Ferguson & Faith: Sparking Leadership & Awakening Community (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2015); on the post-racist future, see Michael Eric Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 64. Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 41–3, 68–70; see the black church as a counter-public sphere in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 11; Raphael G. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness (New York; London: New York University Press, 2014), 14. See Traci E. West, Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Cheryl J. Sanders, Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People: A Pathway to African American Social Transformation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Marcela Cristi, From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001), 79. W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935, reprinted 1968), 695.

Early Afro-Pentecostal Interracial Communities 6

7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

57

William J. Wilson, Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives (New York: The Free Press, 1973); Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack,” cited in Virginia Cyrus, ed., Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (Mountainview, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1993), 209–13. I was reminded of the co-constitution of racism by racial privilege, prejudice, and power by David Esterline, director of the Institute of Cross-Cultural Theological Education, McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975)—while Todorov focused on literary genres, this chapter will use these hermeneutics to focus on early Afro-Pentecostal interraciality as transgressive; Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Todorov, Fantastic, 24–57; Honig, 97. Todorov, Fantastic, 25. Todorov, Fantastic, 24–57; Honig, 97. “The Church” in “The Niagara Movement: Declaration of Principles 1905,” (accessed May 16, 2016.) scua.library.umass.edu/digital/dubois/312.2.839-01-07.pdf Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street: An Eyewitness Account (South Plainfield, NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1980 [1925]), 68–9, cited in Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 249; also see Gaston Espinosa, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography & Documentary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Bartleman, Azusa Street, 68–9; also see Estrelda Alexander, The Women of Azusa Street (Cleveland, TN: The Pilgrim Press, 2005). Todorov, Fantastic, 46, 52. Todorov, Fantastic, 25, 33; also on Pentecostal interracial liminality, see Espinosa, Seymour, 141–2. David D. Daniels III, “Transcending the Exclusionary Ecclesial Practices of Racial Hierarchies of Authority: An Early Pentecostal Trajectory,” Ecclesiology and Exclusion: Boundaries of Being and Belonging in Postmodern Times, edited by Dennis M. Doyle, Timothy J. Furry, and Pascal D. Bazzell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012), 145. Daniels, “Transcending,” 145–6. Todorov, Fantastic, 52 “The Members of the Holy Nazarene Tabernacle Apostolic Church At War With Each Other,” The Broad Ax (Salt Lake City, Utah), April 12, 1913: 1. The Broad Ax, April 12, 1913: 1. Morris E. Golder, History of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (1973; reprint, Birmingham, AL: Faith Apostolic Church, 1993), 58–9, 70–2, 85. Honig, Emergency, 97. For a theological study of hospitality see Christine Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999); Sharon Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg/Fortress, 2000). A revision of Freire’s concept of humility; see Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, [1970], 2006 rpt.), 90. Alastair Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin (London: Routledge, 2015), 131.

5

“Peace Be Still”: James Cleveland and the Paradox of Peace in the Civil Rights Movement Johari Jabir

The Reverend James Cleveland, the “King of Gospel Music,” was a singer, pianist, arranger, composer, conductor, pastor, entrepreneur, and founder of the Gospel Music Workshop of America (GMWA), the largest convention of gospel music in the world. Cleveland’s 1963 recording, “Peace Be Still,”1 marked a significant shift in the development of modern gospel music. The song was a bridge between the early folk/ blues style of gospel and the soulful sound of gospel inspired by modern jazz, pop, and soul. In addition to the musical significance of “Peace Be Still,” its reception catapulted Cleveland to the status of a front man in gospel that was imitated by other male choir directors.2 The increased performance of black male choir directors in worship meant that male preachers no longer held a monopoly over the performance of masculinity in black churches. While this history provides an explanation for the competing masculinities of preacher and musician, it is not intended to ignore the presence of women choir directors whose gender and musicianship serves as a double threat to the masculine authority of the church. In addition to the historic shifts in music and gender, “Peace Be Still” expressed a central paradox of the Civil Rights movement: the staging of peaceful protests in a society whose very foundation was formed on acts of violence against black people.

Master the Tempest is Raging—Peace Be Still! Cleveland’s version of “Peace Be Still” has left such an indelible imprint on gospel music that he is assumed to be the song’s original composer. However, Cleveland’s version of the song is the result of several arrangements based upon an earlier composition. The original composition, “Master the Tempest is Raging,” was composed by Mary Ann Baker and H.R. Palmer. In 1874 Baker was commissioned by her pastor to compose a song related to “Christ Stilling the Tempest.”3 Baker and Palmer’s hymn enjoyed some moderate appeal amongst religious schools and churches. Almost two decades later Baker reflected on a new political connection for her composition, “during the weeks when we kept watch by the bedside of our greatly beloved President Garfield, it was

60

Handbook of African American Theology

republished as especially appropriate to the time, and was sung at some of the many funerals services held throughout the United States.”4 During his 1963 Presidential Prayer Breakfast, John F. Kennedy invoked the song’s refrain: On our way from the last meeting to this, we met two members of Parliament who carried with them a message from Lord Home to this breakfast, in which Lord Home quoted the Bible and said that perhaps the wisest thing that was said in the Bible was the words, “Peace, be still.”5

Even as he quoted this refrain, Kennedy was well aware how the violent tempest raging against black civil rights would define his presidency. verse Master, the tempest is raging! The billows are tossing high! The sky is o’ershadowed with blackness, No shelter or help is nigh; Carest Thou not that we perish? How canst Thou lie asleep, When each moment so madly is threat’ning A grave in the angry deep?6 Cleveland: “Get up Jesus”

Even before his election, Kennedy was acquainted with the local acts of resistance during the 1940s and 1950s, regional acts that transitioned into large-scale uprisings and mass protests by the 1960s. By 1960 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested while protesting in Atlanta, and the Greensboro 4 student sit-in inspired other sit-ins across the country. In 1961, CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) sent Freedom Riders into the south and, in 1962, after James Meredith had been denied admission to the University of Mississippi four times, Kennedy ordered the national guard to escort him to class. In 1963, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staged its Birmingham Campaign. Though peaceful in intent and design, the Birmingham Campaign was met with high-pressure hoses and police dogs ordered by City Commissioner Bull Conner. Within this historical/social/political context, a song that was originally composed with seemingly no connection to the black experience was heard anew: “Master the Tempest is Raging” became “Peace Be Still.” Cleveland’s version was a combination of several gospel versions already in circulation, such as the one arranged by George Jordan and performed by Harold and the Majestics.7 The phrase “timing is everything” applies to Cleveland’s version, as his release provided a timely commentary on the raging tempest of the 1960s. chorus The winds and the waves shall obey thy will Peace, be still!

Peace in the Civil Rights Movement

61

Whether the wrath of the storm-tossed sea Or demons or men, or whatever it be, No waters can swallow the ship where it lies The Master of ocean, and earth, and skies; They all shall sweetly obey Thy will, Peace, be still! Peace, be still!

“Peace Be Still” is a musical framing of the biblical account of Jesus sailing on the stormy sea of Galilee with his disciples (Mt. 8:23–7; Mk. 4:35–41). The opening lyric, “Master the tempest is raging” is a paraphrase of the question posed by the disciples to Jesus. In the rough and gravelling singing voice of James Cleveland, the question was turned into a command when he added “Get up Jesus!” Here, Cleveland renders the verse an act of “conjure,” where Jesus is not asked but summoned. Such acts of conjure in gospel songs fit the description put forth by James Baldwin in his final novel, Just Above My Head. Baldwin states, “Maybe gospel songs begin out of a blasphemy and presumption—what the church would call blasphemy and presumption: out of entering God’s suffering and challenging God almighty to have or to give or to withhold mercy.”8 But Cleveland’s vocals and lyrics were not acting alone, as the drummer’s sequence of triplets on the snare drum set the tempo to the effect of a military march—perfect accompaniment for a march against Jim Crow. On piano, John Hason’s bass motifs create a duet between him and the drummer, giving the song its intensity. Solomon Herriot imitates the “winds and waves” through a series of glissandos on the Hammond B-3. Each time the chorus repeats “Peace Be Still,” it does so with the feel of “Chanting down Babylon.”9 All of these musical elements in “Peace Be Still” are crucial to the political economy of the song because this music has the potential to impact the terms and conditions of power between the oppressed and the oppressor. As Walter Brueggemann reminds us, we must face the reality that every legitimate form of order is to some extent an expression of authorized violence calculated to keep the powerless out of control. We should not be romantic about peace. Shalom is caused by and requires interventions that will redistribute power.10

Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still” is a redistribution of musical economy wherein the assumed neutral language of peace takes on new meaning when sung by these black citizens. While the ship was part of Barker and Palmer’s lyrical content, the image of the ship has particularly potency in black culture. In fact, the ship is one of a few instruments of modernity that are reimagined for alternative meanings. Paul Gilroy’s discussion of ships in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness is befitting for how the ship functions in Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still”: The image of the ship—living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion— is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons. . . . Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activities as well as

62

Handbook of African American Theology the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs.11

The image of the ship in black music extends as far back as slave spirituals such as “The Old Ship of Zion.” Theologically, Cleveland’s conjuring of Jesus in the context of the ship corresponds to how projects in black liberation theology have [re]imagined Jesus as a fellow sufferer with an experience radically similar to the plight of black people in the American empire. In this instance, Cleveland’s music resonated with both the Christian faith of his listeners and their reality as black people in an anti-black society. During the 1960s, Cleveland toured the country and abroad with a small group known as the Cleveland Singers. Original Cleveland Singer Gene Viale toured with Cleveland during this era and recalled the stubborn resistance against integration: While pumping gas, for instance, we may look over to see a young man showing a knife, just sort of playing with it as he stared straight at us. If we needed to use the rest room, they were still segregated for negroes and whites . . . there were those horrible signs, to let us know that “No Negroes were Allowed.”12

Within this context Cleveland made several appearances with civil rights figures who blended the personal with the political. Such was the case with the 1966 “Gospel Festival Spectacular” hosted by Rev. Clay Evans, pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the featured speaker, with groups like the James Cleveland Singers, the Soul Stirrers, the Staple Singers, and the Fellowship Radio Choir providing the music.13 Just as Dorsey’s National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses provided a cultural institution of belonging for migrants who experienced racism and classism, Cleveland’s GMWA provided a safe haven and a place of belonging for black queers who were exiled within black communities and their churches during the next raging tempest of the post-civil rights backlash.

Sonic politics Amid the numerous “protest” anthems during the Civil Rights era, Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still,” recorded with the Angelic Choir of Nutley, New Jersey, was the first live gospel album to sell over 800,000 copies to an exclusively black audience.14 To date, there exists no record of any social and/or political intentions on the part of Cleveland regarding this song. Will Boone’s interview with the Angelic Choir has determined that their “participation in the project [the recording of “Peace Be Still”] had no explicit social or political aims.”15 And yet, beyond the intentions of the composer and the performers are the “sonic politics” of the song.16 By sonic politics, I mean the political labor a song performs by way of its multiple elements of sonic production. In matters of interpretation, sonic politics asks what the song says, but more importantly, it theorizes what it does.17 “Peace Be Still” is a song about peace but it is not a peaceful song: it does not use the bourgeois style of peaceful music to obscure the violent truth of black life in America.

Peace in the Civil Rights Movement

63

Cleveland’s arrangement of vocals, instrumentation, and lyrics is the “manner that reflects the matter,” to borrow a phrase from Richard Wright’s discussion on depicting the violence of black life in writing.18 With its unapologetic syncretism of West African cosmology and Christian theology, and the sensibilities of a blues epistemology, gospel songs like “Peace Be Still” are a distinctly religious example of how black people “make sense” of a social order that does not—even on its own terms—make sense. Here, the musical language of Charles Long’s description of a people’s religion as “expressions, motivations, intentions, behaviors, styles and rhythms” is fitting (emphasis mine).19 Furthermore, as Paul Tillich writes in Theology of Culture, “every style points to a selfinterpretation of man thus answering the question of the ultimate meaning of life.”20 The musical elements in “Peace Be Still” express a [re]mix of language, logic, and sound that exposes the violent contradictions of race, rights, protest, and citizenship indicative of the black experience in America. However, as demonstrated in the black church’s response to Cleveland’s death, the social and religious violence of race can be turned inward to inflict pain and suffering upon members of the community whose lives are rendered disposable. In the decades following the success of “Peace Be Still,” Cleveland’s compositions and arrangements became “standards” in black churches, and many church musicians received their training at his Gospel Music Workshop of America. The GMWA’s motto, where everybody is somebody, was a civil rights theme harking back to slave spirituals such as “Plenty Good Room,” and “All God’s Children.” These songs expressed the enslaved African’s faith in the “whosoever” theology of the gospel, but they also imagine an alternative social vision of access and equity. In the context of the GMWA, this same motto affirmed the “somebodiness” of black queer people who represented a sizeable population of GMWA, despite Cleveland’s inability to reconcile his own sexuality and spirituality—at least publicly. Nevertheless, upon his death in 1991, several lawsuits and accusations regarding his sexuality forced issues that Cleveland kept private out into the open. The communal response rendered Cleveland the “scapegoat” for the black church’s internalized homophobia that was politicized during the post-civil rights era. As Robert Reid Pharr argues, “To strike the homosexual, the scapegoat, the sign of chaos and crisis, is to return the community to normality, to create boundaries around blackness.”21 Punishing Cleveland for matters of sexuality relating to his death was not only the black community’s betrayal of a man they exalted to the status of a king, but also its way of making a break with the black working class religious culture that produced him.

James Cleveland’s early life and major break in his career Too often, with no attention to the broader historical context of his death, the sins of James Cleveland are confined to narrow categories of sexuality and identity. And yet, the communal response to Cleveland’s death provides a cultural confession to Lester Spence’s discussion of the “neoliberalization of black politics” that demonizes certain aspects of the past in order “to get black people to act according to market principles.”22 As such, a figure of Cleveland’s stature can only symbolize how the queer and working

64

Handbook of African American Theology

class history of the black church represents a spiritual and political failure in black Christian citizenship. Disavowing the importance of James Cleveland in African American Christian theology and historiography calls to mind Walter Benjamin’s comment that “even the dead will not be safe” from the enemy of black freedom.23 Cleveland’s legacy offers to us the potential for Sankofa hermeneutics; a “spark of hope in the past,” rooted in black working class religious culture that provided spiritual resources for liberation and movement building.24 The intersectionality of Cleveland’s biography and legacy is a testimony of how black working class religious culture used syncretic modes of conjure, embodiment, and communal pleasure to transform social alienation into structures of liberation.25 James Cleveland was born on December 5, 1931, in Chicago, Illinois. That same year, the “father of gospel music,” Thomas A. Dorsey, established two gospel choruses in Chicago: one at Ebenezer Baptist Church and the other at Pilgrim Baptist Church, where Cleveland’s grandmother was a member. Pilgrim began as a small house church organized by a group of southern migrants who worked as domestics and manual laborers. The small aggregation was officially recognized as a church in 1916.26 Cleveland’s grandmother took the young James to church for choir rehearsals and Sunday morning services. At five years of age Dorsey noticed Cleveland’s talent for singing and he became the choir’s boy soprano. In the small biographical literature that exists on Cleveland, by his own admission poverty is a consistent theme.27 Cleveland’s father, Ben Cleveland, was a retired Army sergeant who worked on WPA projects.28 Little is known about the occupation of his mother, Rosie Lee Cleveland, but in Anthony Helibut’s The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times, Cleveland is quoted as saying “things were never that bad.”29 In this context, the young James Cleveland learned some of his earliest lessons in improvisation. He said: My folks being just plain, every day people, we couldn’t afford a piano. So I used to practice each night right there on the windowsill. I took those wedges and crevices and made me black and white keys. And, baby, I played just like Roberta. By the time I was in high school, I was some jazz pianist.30

The lack of visible resources in Cleveland’s background cannot account for the wealth of invisible resources that benefited him. He attended Wendell Phillips High School during the tenure of Captain Walter Dyett, one of Chicago’s legendary music teachers. Dyett taught some of the giants in black entertainment and music such as Nat King Cole, Bo Diddley, and Sam Cooke.31 After high school, Cleveland played for several Chicago churches. True Light Baptist Church stands out among them because it had a rich history of musicians that included Nat King Cole, whose father, Reverend E.J. Coles, served as pastor during the 1930s.32 The institutions of church, school, and network of gospel musicians provided Cleveland with a musical formation grounded in black working-class struggles. Race, gender, and class, specifically the role of black women, were all critical to Cleveland’s musicianship: the unorthodox but improvised way he learned to play as well as the gendered body he imitated grounded the queer epistemology in Cleveland’s legacy. As Susan McClary reminds us, “music is mediated through actual people with gendered bodies.”33 An informal list of the black female

Peace in the Civil Rights Movement

65

influences on Cleveland would read like this: from Roberta Martin and Mildred Falls he learned the piano style of gospel; from Sallie Martin he learned to conduct mass choirs; and from Magnolia Butts he learned how to organize and structure his GMWA. This female influence served Cleveland well when he was an accompanist of the legendary black female gospel group The Caravans. According to Horace Clarence Boyer, “The Caravans produced more gospel superstars than any other group or choir.”34 In addition to the black female history in gospel, Cleveland’s vocal style was emblematic of the black male quartet tradition that began in the post-emancipation era at historically black colleges and universities. After the 1871 national tour of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Hampton and Tuskegee replicated the Fisk method of fundraising and sent students into the community to sing spirituals. The ensembles of Hampton and Tuskegee were specifically all-male vocal quartets, with the Hampton Institute Quartet’s notoriety dating back to its founding in 1880.35 Soon after Tuskegee was established in 1881, Booker T. Washington sent the school’s first male quartet on a fundraising tour in 1884.36 These early a capella quartets inspired community-based male quartets that rivaled those affiliated with institutions. As Boyer documents in the after-life of a former Tuskegee Institute male singer, One of the university singers who went on to teach at a high school in Lowndes, Alabama was Vernon W. Barnett, a graduate of Tuskegee. One of his students in quartet singing was R.C. Foster who came to Bessemer, Alabama, in 1915 to work in the mines. Foster formed a group of men into a quartet that sang as entertainment during their lunch period and in the evenings after work. Within a few months the group was singing in their local churches.37

Black college and university quartets inspired community based vocal quartets and new styles. At the beginning of the twentieth century, black barbershop quartets experimented with “close harmonies,” smooth baritone styling, and falsetto crooning. Soon thereafter, Jubilee Quartets combined the previous quartet styles while resurrecting the “ring-shout” and “praise house” pulse of slave singing. Cleveland’s vocal style was an amalgamation of the black male vocal group tradition that preceded him. While his voice grew more and more raspy over time, there remained a consistent quality that harked back to the male quartet tradition. He sang with the crooning baritone indicative of the barbershop quartets. He frequently deployed a falsetto vocal technique from the barbershop style that was also heard in the earliest gospel groups such as Pilgrim Travelers and Swan Silvertones. Later, this crooning technique would come to be Sam Cooke’s signature style during his tenure with the Soul Stirrers, who enjoyed immense popularity during the 1950s. It is quite likely that Cleveland borrowed his use of falsetto from Cooke. A major break in Cleveland’s musical career happened when he left Chicago for Detroit, Michigan, where, as Aretha Franklin said, I was blessed to meet James so early in his career; he was barely out of his teens when he came to live with us in Detroit and accept his position as minister of

66

Handbook of African American Theology music for New Bethel. . . . He wrote hundreds of songs, many of which—“Walk on by Faith,” “He’s Using Me,” and the magnificent “Peace Be Still”—became gospel standards.38

In addition to establishing himself at New Bethel, Cleveland also began to work with Rev. Charles Ashley Craig, one of the most innovative musicians in gospel music. The two collaborated to produce Cleveland’s first major hit, Cooke’s “The Love of God” featuring Craig’s choir, The Voices of Tabernacle. Anthony Helibut describes the Voices of Tabernacle as “the most disciplined gospel choir ever.”39 In Detroit, Cleveland encountered the lively innovative climate of several experiments in black music: Motown, of course, a thriving jazz and soul culture, and the persistent influence of the blues from second wave migrants. The gospel musicians around Cleveland at the time were not loyal to any one style: they interacted with the various musical forms and integrated them into their style of gospel. Detroit gospel musicians such as Charles Ashley Craig, Herbert “Pee-Wee” Pickard, and Jimmy Mitchell helped Cleveland to establish the modern sensibilities in his style. Cleveland, Craig, Pickard, and others in their inner circle were known to attend the Mozambique Jazz Club on Sunday nights, where they interfaced with artists such as Ray Charles, Gloria Lynn, and Art Blakey.40 The modern sensibilities of “Peace Be Still” reflect Cleveland’s time in Detroit, even though the song’s impact renders the testimony of those who came long before Cleveland.

“The Gospel Music Workshop of America”—Where Everybody is Somebody The Detroit riot of July 1967 exposed the racial divides between blacks and whites, but it also revealed the class divides within the black community, with black radicals and nationalists finding themselves among the first to be blamed. The death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 exacerbated the racial violence in cities like Detroit. The first meeting of Cleveland’s Gospel Music Workshop of America was held in Detroit in 1968. Civil Rights organizer and union activist E.D. Nixon had popularized the phrase Everybody is Somebody, and this was the motto of GMWA.41 Cleveland is affectionately known as “the founder” of GMWA but the organization’s formation was part of a broader discussion and context. Years before the founding of GMWA, a group of local Detroit musicians formed a gospel venture that included Charles Craig, Mattie Moss Clark, Lucille Lemon, and James Cleveland. This group convened about the need to train the younger generation of gospel musicians on how to be effective church musicians. These conversations did not result in an official institution but, following the death of Charles Craig on January 2, 1968, Cleveland had hoped to be called as the church’s pastor. When the church did not select Cleveland, he assembled several of his peers from the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses (NCGCC) and founded the GMWA at Ed Smith’s Detroit Flower Shop.42 Two years later, Cleveland founded Cornerstone Institutional Baptist Church in Los Angeles, California, where he resided until his death.

Peace in the Civil Rights Movement

67

Cleveland’s success after “Peace Be Still” forged new ground in the recording industry. As Bill Carpenter documented in Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia, “After keeping Savoy Records for several years, Cleveland founded King James Records in 1985.”43 For the first time in the history of gospel music, a gospel artist had his own series, “James Cleveland Presents.” Cleveland’s new connections in the record industry were directly linked to his Gospel Music Workshop of America, a relationship with commerce that earned Cleveland the reputation of being a “star-maker,” which made him wealthy and earned him notoriety with the largely secular Grammy Awards. Cleveland’s 1974 release, “In the Ghetto,” earned him his first Grammy Award.44 In an Ebony Magazine feature on his wealth, Cleveland stated, “Everybody knows I’m not as poor as I used to be, but it’s not in good taste for a Christian minister or anyone else to talk about how much he’s worth.”45 While Cleveland’s relationship with Savoy suggested progress for gospel music in general, his commercial success was viewed negatively by the older generation of gospel musicians, especially those in the NCGCC who thought Cleveland’s flair for commercial success compromised the sincerity of gospel’s message. Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still” inspired other versions in the 1970s and 1980s. Nikki Giovanni performed her poem, “The Great Pax Whitie,” with Benny Diggs and the New York Community Choir in 1971.46 Accompanied by a remake of Cleveland’s version of the song, Giovanni traces America’s genealogy of race and violence in the making of Western civilization and white supremacy, a poetic journey from “Peace Be Still” to Peace Be Just. Challenging the assumption of peace in this history, she asks the black listener, “ain’t we got no pride?” Detroit gospel singer Vanessa Bell Armstrong released her first album entitled “Peace Be Still” in 1983.47 The popularity of these versions of “Peace Be Still” mirrored the popularity and success of Cleveland and his GMWA, which presented a glaring conundrum for black church culture in the post-Civil Rights era as an overwhelming number of black Christian institutions forged alliances with white Christian evangelical conservatives. The combination of Cleveland’s stature in gospel, the church’s reliance on the GMWA for musical training, repertoire, and national exposure, and the welcoming atmosphere for black Christian queers all collided with the church’s explicit campaigns against all forms of queerness. It was not simply gay and lesbian sexuality that was assaulted at this social and political conjuncture in the church’s history, but all forms of identity and embodiment that stood outside the strictures of the bourgeois Christian family were rejected in favor of a normative black subject who could reap the benefits of American capitalism.

Complications and controversies In the GMWA, the presence and participation of people with non-normative sexual identities became a problem that was addressed by Cleveland in mass choir rehearsal. As a former member of GMWA recalled, There were boys leaving home as boys and when they landed at GMWA they decided to go drag, coming to session in full drag but not good drag, and women coming to sessions in butch apparel . . . singers wanting to preach and preachers

68

Handbook of African American Theology wanting to sing. So, he said “everybody look at your badge. What does it say? If it says Patrick don’t come here as Patricia. If it says Ericka don’t come here as Erick. If it says singer under your name then don’t come here trying preach . . .” and so on . . . finally saying, “Tell your neighbor, neighbor. Be What’s on Your Badge.”48

This account reflects an aspect of how Cleveland negotiated his own sexuality: he did not deny his homosexuality nor did he, in any public sense, declare it. Cleveland made one last attempt to form a new organization amid rumors that he was infected with HIV/AIDS. Cleveland spearheaded a new movement called “The Free Spirited Baptist Churches” that consisted of a small network of Baptist working class churches which wanted to challenge the narrow confines of Baptist doctrine on the “workings of the spirit.” In addition to their concerns with doctrine, these churches were also bonded by a common affinity for what had become known as “traditional gospel music.” Among the chief organizers of the meeting were James Cleveland and Charles H. Nicks, a longtime friend and collaborator of Cleveland from his days in Detroit, Michigan. As was customary for such gatherings, smaller local “workshops” were organized for gospel composers to teach new material. Charles Nicks taught the choir one of his most recent compositions, “Hold Back the Night.” Both Cleveland and Nicks were, in physical weight and volume, half the size they once were: “Hold Back the Night” was performed with a sense of both personal pleading and collective grief. Charles Nicks died in the summer of 1988, and James Cleveland died in February of 1992. In March of the same year, Jet magazine reported that 22-year-old Christopher B. Harris sued Cleveland’s estate on the grounds that Cleveland infected him with HIV.49 In addition to Harris, Andre Cleveland, who identified himself as Cleveland’s godson, sued Cleveland’s estate for an amount greater than was allocated by Cleveland’s trust.50 While rumors of a settlement between Cleveland’s estate and Harris circulate, the courts decided against Andre Cleveland’s right to an increased share in Rev. Cleveland’s estate.51 The sins of James Cleveland must not be conflated with those of his community and the institutions he helped to build. On the surface, the communal response to Cleveland’s death appears to be concerned only with sexuality, and sexual identity in particular. But when the intersectionality of his biography is placed within the broader context of the black community, Cleveland embodied a black queer spirituality that was foregrounded in black working class culture. When African American theology and religious history conform to the nation’s narrative of progress, the queer and working class resources of the past are rejected—though not lost.

The current tempest and retrieval of liberation practices The timeliness of Cleveland’s death bears an uncanny resemblance to the paradoxical realities of his 1963 “Peace Be Still.” By the time of his death a new tempest was raging against the black poor and working class in America: the neo-liberal policies of social alienation and ruthless privatization led to bleak forms of black nihilism that resonate with the climate of Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still.” The anti-black violence that has produced contemporary Black Lives Matter protests harkens back to the era of student

Peace in the Civil Rights Movement

69

sit-ins in the 1960s. The recent uprisings in spaces like Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Maryland, and Cleveland, Ohio are connected to the past rebellions in 1960s Detroit, Chicago, and Newark. In each of these episodes—then and now—black youth and working class populations are blamed for social crisis that, in reality, is the result of vicious forms of capitalism, police brutality, compulsive imprisonment, and pervasive economic inequality. The black church that betrayed Cleveland and other black queers is not a victim of the current crisis in black citizenship, as some critics have argued.52 There exists an overwhelming black church constituency that intentionally serves the neo-liberal agenda that produces and sustains black inequality in the US. Even amid the current raging tempest, practices of black Christian liberation and justice can be retrieved from the black queer and working class past of gospel music, specifically that of James Cleveland.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

James Cleveland, Peace Be Still: Rev. James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir of Nutley, NJ. (Savoy Records MG-14076; recorded September, 1963, released 1964; vinyl). Interview with Nash Shaefer, Sr., October 12, 2010. Ira D. Sankey, Sankey’s Story of The Gospel Hymns and of Sacred Songs and Solos, (Philadelphia: The Sunday Schools Times Co., 1906), 170–1. Sankey, Sankey’s Story, 172. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963. Mary A. Baker and Horatio R. Palmer, Master the Tempest is Raging, 1874. Interview with Elder George Jordan, May 13, 2011. James Baldwin, Just Above My Head (New York: Random House, 1978), 6. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony MacFarlane, eds., Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). Walter Brueggeman, Peace: Understanding Biblical Themes (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), 106. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4. Gene Viale, I Remember Gospel: And I Keep on Singing (Bloomington, IN: Author House Books, 2010), 95. Reverend Clay Evans Collection, Harold Washington Library, Box 13, Folder 18, Church History, 1966, “Gospel Festival Spectacular.” Anthony Helibut, The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 242. Will Boone, James Cleveland’s Peace Be Still in the Midst of the Civil Rights-Era Tempest, paper delivered at the Society of Ethnomusicology Conference, 2014. Johari Jabir, Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army” (Cleveland: Ohio State University Press, 2017). Here, I draw from the work of two scholars: Christopher Small’s concept of “Musicking” in Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1998) and Shana Redmond’s work on anthems, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

70

Handbook of African American Theology

18 Kenneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre, eds., Conversations with Richard Wright (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 1993), 67. 19 Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Sounds, and Images in the Study of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986, repr. Aurora, CO: Davis Group, 1995), 7. 20 Paul Tillich, Theology of Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 70. 21 Robert F. Reid Pharr, Black Gay Men: Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 104. 22 Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (March 2013): 139–59. 23 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. L. Wieseltier (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255. 24 Benjamin, Theses, 255. 25 My formulation of “social alienation into structures of liberation” is based on Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interest: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and also Rev. Lynice Pinkard, communication, March 9, 2017. 26 Interview with Darlene Brown, longtime member of Pilgrim Baptist Church, January 4, 2018. 27 Interview with Norma Jean Pender, aka “Reverend Mother”, October 21, 2016. 28 Chicago Tribune (obituary), March 27, 1985; Toni Helibut, The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 234. 29 Helibut, Gospel Sound, 234. 30 Helibut, Gospel Sound, 235. 31 Ron Grossman, “How Capt. Dyett Turned Du Sable’s Young Musicians into Stars,” Chicago Tribune, 1960, and Sufiya Abdur-Rahman, “Phillips High School is a cradle of history.” Chicago Tribune (December 15, 2002). 32 As documented in Robert Marovich, A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 162. 33 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 139. 34 Horace Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (Washington, D.C.: Elliot & Clark Publishing, 1995), 217. 35 See Kip Lornell, Virginia Blues, Country, and Gospel Records, 1902–1943: An Annotated Bibliography (Lexington: KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 81. 36 Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 322. 37 Horace Clarence Boyer, How sweet, 31. 38 David Ritz, Aretha: From These Roots (New York: Villard, 1999). 39 Helibut, Gospel Sound, 239. 40 Interview with Norma Jean Pender, aka “Reverend Mother”, October 21, 2016. 41 Robert J. Walker, Let My People Go! The Miracle of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2007), 146. 42 Interview with Norma Jean Pender, aka “Reverend Mother”, October 21, 2016. 43 Bill Carpenter, Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia (San Francisco: Blackbeat Books, 2005), 90. 44 Carpenter, Uncloudy Days, 89. 45 “Reverend James Cleveland: His Home and His Church Are His Greatest Joys” in Ebony Magazine (December 1984): 148–54.

Peace in the Civil Rights Movement

71

46 Nikki Giovanni with Benny Diggs and the New York Community Choir, Like a Ripple on a Pond, Niktom Records NK4200, 1973, vinyl LP. 47 Vanessa Bell Armstrong, Peace Be Still, Onyx/Muscle Shoals Sound, 1983. 48 Interview with Rusty Watson, August 23, 2010, and communication January 9, 2018. 49 Jet Magazine (March 2, 1992): 62. 50 Los Angeles Times (October 9, 1991). 51 Court of Appeal, Second District, Division 5, California, No. B072638. Decided: August 23, 1993. 52 See Anthony B. Pinn’s The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 111, where Pinn argues that, regarding the conservative anti-gay theologies of the black church, “The Black Church is a victim of this perspective.”

6

African American Evangelicals Soong-Chan Rah

Students of American religion often limit the term “evangelical” to refer to North American Christians of European descent. More specifically in the early part of the twenty-first century, US Evangelicalism was identified with white Southern, politicallyconservative Republicans. The dominance of the white Evangelical story in the story of US Christianity has specifically meant the exclusion of the story of African American evangelicals. This lacuna results in an insufficient understanding of attempts at racial integration and increasing racial diversity among evangelicals in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century. Self-identified African American evangelicals, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, held to a conservative theological framework but were often excluded from key areas of US Evangelical leadership and influence. The focus of this chapter is on the development of a unique and specific African American evangelical identity in the 1960s and 1970s and its intersection with the evangelical movement in the United States.

Evangelicalism as a larger twentieth-century movement Defining evangelicalism presents an elusive task. The label is used in different contexts as a political, social, ecclesial, theological term. Seen through the political lens, US Evangelicalism can be reduced to a white, middle-class, rural/suburban, politically conservative description. Seen in ecclesial and theological terms, there may be less agreement and consensus but a few salient beliefs emerge. Most evangelicals would hold to a theology that focuses on a high view of Scripture (biblicism), an emphasis on the redemptive work of Jesus (Christocentrism), the power of conversion (conversionism), and an active, lived faith (activism). On the ecclesial level, there would be an openness to work across denominational structures (trans-denominationalism) as well as a commitment to revivalistic spiritual faith (revivalism) that crosses these boundaries. The sociological characteristics of evangelicalism involve the intersection of evangelicals through relational networks. Organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Christianity Today, Young Life, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, as well as educational institutions like Gordon-Conwell Theological

74

Handbook of African American Theology

Seminary and Wheaton College, provide social connections that knit Evangelicals across various boundaries. Not only did Evangelicals form social connections, they also formed a social imagination that perceived themselves standing as cultural warriors against the onslaught of secular society. This self-perception of persecution and attack would necessitate tightening the boundaries around a US Evangelical identity. For the purposes of this chapter, there will be a distinction between evangelicalism with a lower case “e” which refers to the larger movement that reflects an ecclesial and theological affinity versus a capitalized Evangelicalism which will refer to the sociological parameters and identity that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. US Evangelicals perceive themselves in the line of orthodoxy that traces back to biblical times. They see themselves as the inheritors and even the guardians of biblical faith. Evangelicals, therefore, would exhibit anxiety as American culture and society perceived as a city set on a hill and as the New Jerusalem now exhibited characteristics of fallen Babylon. Political engagement focused, therefore, on the maintaining of traditional values and the need to stand against an American society that was deteriorating. African American Christianity as expressed through the Civil Rights movement would be perceived as part of an unwelcome change in American society. Despite significant theological affinity, there would be a mutual rejection between late twentieth-century US Evangelicalism and the historic black churches.

Ecclesial intersection of the black church with evangelicalism Despite the gap between these two streams of American Christianity, significant theological and ecclesial overlap exists. For example, the conversionist impulse and revivalistic zeal rooted in a high view of Scripture can be found in both streams. Even in the realm of missions, the black church offers a narrative of missionary zeal that even predates white attempts at missions. Evangelical history harks back to the story of Adoniram Judson, who is granted the title of America’s First Foreign Missionary.1 However, an African American former slave, George Liele, actually owns the honor. Liele was a freed black slave who left the colonies for Jamaica in 1782 and began a ministry of preaching in 1783–4, nearly three full decades before Judson would sail for Burma from Salem, Massachusetts in 1812. Liele’s evangelistic and church planting efforts in Jamaica led to the establishment of the Baptist denomination on the island, with slaves, freedmen, and whites joining churches started by Liele. Despite Liele’s evangelical missionary credentials, he has been largely ignored by US Evangelicalism. In the story of the Great Migration, we can observe another example of ecclesial affinity between the black church and evangelicalism. A revivalistic conversionist impulse appeared in the African American community as it had through the missionary impulse of George Liele. This impulse would result in the planting of new, vibrant, and growing churches as part of the Great Migration to the northern cities. The Great Migration, that transported a huge population of African Americans to the Northern cities, resulted in the establishment of significant urban congregations in the northern and eastern cities.

African American Evangelicals

75

The growth of the African American community was acutely felt in the city of Chicago, which saw the community grow from 4,000 in 1870 to 50,000 in 1915. The numbers would continue to swell past World War II; over ten times as many Negroes lived in Chicago in 1966 as in 1920.2 The significant influx of African Americans would increase the presence of Christians and churches in the North. By 1938, there were 475 churches in Chicago. In the African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, which also served as the center of African American cultural life for Chicago, there would be “five churches . . . seating over 2,000 persons and claiming more than 10,000 members, and some fifty church buildings seating between 500 and 2,000 persons.”3 The black churches on the south side of Chicago would be the first evidence of the megachurch phenomenon in the United States. The conversionist and activist impulse that defined evangelicalism would be demonstrated in the missional activist faith of African American churches. During the Great Migration, the Pentecostal movement was sparked in Los Angeles, CA and affected black and white relationships in the American church. The Pentecostal movement began as a diverse community but eventually splintered along racial lines. The igniting spark of the modern Pentecostal movement is traced to the Azusa Street Revivals led by an African American pastor, William J. Seymour. Born in 1870 in Louisiana, Seymour grew up in the context of poverty in the American South during the Reconstruction era as a child of former slaves. In 1895, Seymour would make his way to Indianapolis, where he would have a conversion experience in a Methodist Episcopal Church. Seymour traveled throughout the United States with various stops to attend Bible school and to be mentored by revivalists. On February 22, 1906, Seymour would arrive in Los Angeles, CA, where the Azusa Street Revivals would be sparked. Revival meetings started by Seymour were reported in the Los Angeles Daily Times, which stated that tongue speaking had broken out at the Azusa Street Mission, which would be met with both disdain and curiosity.4 Seymour would preside over a multi-ethnic gathering of believers that could be identified as both a “communicative phenomenon” and a “social protest.”5 Diversity and the integration of races would not be sustained. The first grumblings would occur with the arrival of Seymour’s former teacher, Charles Parham. Parham would arrive in Los Angeles, seemingly expecting control of the revival to be ceded to him. Parham “was appalled by what he saw as improper race mixing and the ‘animalisms’ of the unsightly, over emotive worship.”6 Eventually, Parham would set up separate meetings at a nearby YMCA and begin to discredit Seymour throughout the country.7 The promise of integration disintegrated. “Within four years the Azusa Street Mission had a largely black constituency . . . [as] most newly birthed denominations were formed along racial lines. . . . Within ten years of the movement’s beginning, there were virtually two Pentecostal movements—one heavily white, the other almost entirely black.”8 The failure to recognize the parallel theological framework of the black church with evangelical faith yielded an unnecessary gulf between white and black evangelicals. The black church reflected an evangelical theological and ecclesial ethos. William Pannell notes that “the origins of the black Christian experience in American were evangelical in nature.”9 The historical rejection of African American Christianity

76

Handbook of African American Theology

necessitated the formation of structures and systems outside of the control of dominant-culture Evangelicalism.

The National Black Evangelical Association The exclusion of the historic black church from the larger US Evangelical movement meant that, in the latter half of the twentieth century, a new category emerged to intersect with white Evangelicalism. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed an increasing involvement of black evangelicals in the context of white Evangelical institutions. However, there would be increasing frustration by black evangelicals facing racism in the context of white Evangelicalism. That frustration resulted in the formation of the National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA). James Massey notes that the NBEA was formed “when it became clear that social concerns were being excluded from the agenda of the National Association of Evangelicals.”10 The emergence of the NBEA would give black evangelicals the opportunity to connect with one another and to develop an evangelical theology that incorporated greater sensitivity to the African American community. The inaugural conference was held in 1963 in Los Angeles11 and was originally known as the National Negro Evangelical Association (NNEA). The NBEA’s beginnings reveal three key threads of influence and formation reflective of the larger black evangelical movement. The first thread, the fundamentalist thread, is best exemplified by the Nottage brothers of the Plymouth Black Brethren. African American Pentecostals (specifically, the Trinitarian Pentecostal tradition such as the United Pentecostal Council of the Assemblies of God) comprised the second thread. The third thread emerged out of the growing number of African Americans connected to evangelical institutions, attending evangelical colleges and seminaries as well as serving in evangelical parachurch organizations. The first, fundamentalist, thread is seen in the Nottage brothers Whitfield, Talbot (T. B.), and Berlin Martin (1889–1966), who became Christians in their native island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. After migrating to the United States in 1910, they engaged in evangelistic efforts in the urban African American community and established a number of churches in cities throughout the United States. These churches formed a cluster of churches separate from the association of white Plymouth Brethren.12 Despite a lack of organizational connection to the Plymouth Brethren, the Black Brethren demonstrated the conservative fundamentalism of their white counterparts. The theology of the Nottages “was representative of the pre-millennial dispensationalist theology of the early twentieth century, which emerged among the Plymouth Brethren and other fundamentalist groups.”13 The Black Brethren, and in particular B.M. Nottage, practiced an evangelistic zeal. B.M. led revival meetings and crusades in many venues throughout the Midwest states, including many Christian colleges, Brethren churches, Mennonite churches, and other churches with a theologically conservative African American constituency.14 Nottage’s conservative views on Scripture and his evangelistic zeal would provide the evangelical flavor for future NBEA leaders such as “Marvin Printis [Prentis], the first president of the NBEA; William Pannell, the

African American Evangelicals

77

professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary; and Howard Jones, the first black associate of Billy Graham.”15 Also included in the fundamentalist thread would be the contributions of Howard Jones and John Davis Bell of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The second thread consisted of African American Pentecostals; specifically, “the Trinitarian Pentecostal tradition as exemplified in the Church of God in Christ. The best representative of this movement is William H. Bentley.”16 Bentley would go on to become the most prominent, articulate, and consensus-building voice within and for the NBEA, serving as the President of the NBEA from 1970 to 1976. The Pentecostal thread emerged from traditionally black denominations free of white control. Because of the ability to develop in a distinct cultural and ecclesial context, the Pentecostal thread would exhibit greater autonomy and agency than other African American evangelicals. At the same time, the Pentecostals in the NBEA would assert their commitment to the evangelical gospel message. Bentley countered the “condescending attitudes which many a white evangelical has toward the Black church. . . . And the worst cut of all was the very inaccurate accusation: ‘He doesn’t preach the Gospel.’ . . . Pentecostals in particular take exception to the last charge, since we at that time feel that hardly anyone other than ourselves ‘preached the Gospel’ .”17 The NBEA adapted quickly to the growth and influence of Pentecostalism as it embraced Pentecostal pastors with evangelical convictions at an early stage of its history. The third thread emerged out of the growing number of African Americans graduating from Evangelical educational institutions18 and working in Evangelical parachurch organizations. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a number of African Americans attended Evangelical schools such as Wheaton College, Nyack College, Moody Bible Institute, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary. The first president of the NBEA, Marvin Prentis, was a graduate of Fuller Seminary. The second president, Howard Jones, graduated from Nyack College. Tony Evans was a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary. Carl Ellis graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary, and Bill Pannell taught at Fuller Theological Seminary. Evangelical educational institutions would serve as an important hub and a source of theological input for black evangelicals. Evangelical institutions influenced black evangelicals not only through education, but also through employment. African Americans became involved in Evangelical parachurch ministries such as Young Life, Youth for Christ, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). In particular, African American involvement with the work of evangelism through parachurch organizations would come to represent this thread. Because of the emphasis on personal evangelism, many black evangelists received sponsorship and support from white fundamentalists and evangelicals. Howard Jones, Ralph Bell, and the musician Jimmy McDonald all served with the BGEA. The NBEA served a two-fold function. Members of the NBEA would seek a community where they could find respite from the stresses of being an outsider in the white Evangelical world. The NBEA also provided a safe space to explore methods of contextualized ministry for the black community. The NBEA, therefore, had a

78

Handbook of African American Theology

two-pronged emphasis of fellowship and ministry. Bill Bentley points out the “deeply felt need for meaningful fellowship among Blacks of evangelical persuasion across denominational affiliation.”19 The common calling of an activist conversionist evangelical faith would draw members to explore effective practices of ministry.

African American Evangelicalism Tom Skinner Tom Skinner’s story emerges as a critical lens through which one understands twentieth-century African American evangelicalism. Skinner’s story was evangelical through and through. His initial foray into US Evangelicalism was rooted in his ability to share his personal conversion story and to speak about his individual salvation journey. However, when his message shifted towards plumbing the depth of racial injustice in America, the white Evangelical community altered their receptivity to his message. Skinner was the son of a Baptist preacher in Harlem, New York. He was a good student, “president of his high-school student body, a member of the basketball team, president of the Shakespearean Club, and an active member of his church’s youth department.” At the same time that Skinner was excelling at school, he was also the leader of the Harlem Lords, one of the most feared street gangs in New York City. Disgruntled with a seemingly distant God removed from the sufferings of his community, disenchanted with white Christianity’s inadequate gospel, and disappointed with the black church of his father’s generation, Skinner lived a double life of the good church kid and the violent gang leader. The night before a big gang fight, Skinner was converted by an unscheduled gospel radio broadcast. Upon his conversion at the age of 15, Skinner left the street gang. In the following years, he began to preach on the streets of Harlem, attracting crowds and winning converts. In 1962, during his last year in college, Skinner worked alongside eleven others to help form the Harlem Evangelistic Association. The formation of the Harlem Evangelistic Association led Skinner to schedule a major crusade at the worldrenowned Apollo Theater in Harlem. “By the crusade’s end, more than 2,200 people had responded to Skinner’s presentation of the gospel, and the 20-year-old evangelist was hailed as a preaching phenomenon.”20 Skinner’s profile rose with the backing and endorsement of many white Evangelicals. He began making appearances on Moody Radio and would have his own program in the late 1960s. He would continue to speak at large-venue evangelistic crusades around the country. Skinner’s appeal to the broader spectrum of Evangelicals came from his powerful personal testimony. The story of a tough street gang member converting to become a crusade evangelist was irresistible for many white Evangelicals. Evangelicals resonated with the conversionist emphasis of Skinner. By the end of the 1960s and the advent of the 1970s, Skinner gained larger venues to speak his message to the Evangelical world. He was invited to address Wheaton College, recognized as the academic vanguard of Evangelical thought and orthodoxy.

African American Evangelicals

79

Skinner’s series of sermons at Wheaton College in 1968, 1969, and 1970 signaled a shift in the focus of his sermons. Skinner began to incorporate more teachings on the Kingdom of God and the necessity of social concern, responsibility, and action. Racial justice became an important expression of a more justice-oriented message. In 1970, Tom Skinner was asked to address the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Urbana Mission Conference. Skinner preached a sermon that struck at the heart of Evangelicalism with a prophetic challenge to confront aspects of racism found in American society and in American Christianity. He challenged white Evangelicalism’s failure to address the social sin of slavery, as well as addressing white Evangelicalism’s over-emphasis on individual salvation and piety over and above social justice. Skinner refused to hold back on his understanding of the intersection between racial justice, social justice, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. He masterfully wove together multiple themes in raising a challenge to the status quo. When Skinner closed out his sermon with a resounding proclamation that “The Liberator has come!” the gathering erupted into thunderous and sustained ovation. The Urbana ’70 Missions Conference became a benchmark event for African American evangelicals in positive and negative ways. Skinner’s presentation at Urbana signaled the increasing prominence of black evangelicalism and the fresh prophetic voice offered by black evangelicalism. However, Skinner also represented a voice that made many white Evangelicals nervous. As Skinner began to speak more about the Kingdom of God, he began to be perceived as having a political agenda. “Just as Skinner’s ministry was attracting more attention from whites, his outspoken views on issues of social injustice facing the black community intensified (a fact that would lead many Christian radio stations to drop his program due to its ‘political’ content).”21 Skinner’s increasingly frequent rejection by the broader white evangelical community came to a head when he divorced his first wife in 1977.22 Many would point towards his divorce as the reason for his seemingly forced departure from the Evangelical fold. His divorce, however, was finalized in 1977 and was kept quiet for some time. The exclusion of Tom Skinner from Evangelical circles in the early 1970s was based on the changing content of his message. Skinner would continue in ministry, but in a different form after his divorce, as he opted to focus on Christian leadership training.23 He continued his work among the urban poor, particularly working with inner city youth in Newark, NJ. He would increase his influence with African American leadership in other segments of society. Skinner’s ministry impact continued until his untimely death in 1994 at the age of 52, but by that time, Skinner’s voice in the larger Evangelical community could be considered negligible.

John Perkins John Perkins offers an example of an African American evangelical who was able to maintain a strong and visible presence in Evangelical circles over several decades. Perkins’s prominent role among Evangelicals arose from his ability to engage his constituents with a gripping narrative of emerging from poverty into prominence and effectively communicating an affirmation of evangelical convictions.

80

Handbook of African American Theology

One of John Perkins’s key theological contributions is the power of his story lived out in the face of great trials and tribulations. While many Evangelical leaders may possess a great testimony, few rival the embodied story of Jesus’s redemptive power in the life of John Perkins. His story takes the classic American success story and infuses it with an Evangelical spirituality that affirms the power of the gospel while simultaneously challenging existing paradigms of active Christian faith. Poverty was a consistent presence in the early years of John Perkins. Perkins was acutely aware of the poverty that was endemic in his environment and in the reality of the racialized power dynamics at work in the deep South. Perkins dealt with the constant threat of violence, which would eventually be found close to home. The murder of his brother by the local police was another assault on Perkins’s understanding of power and powerlessness. Watching his older brother shot down as he stood up to the police revealed a cultural reality that attempted to instill fear and deprive African Americans of self-determination. Perkins’s conversion occurred after he left the cultural trappings of the South that expressed an unhealthy expression of Christian identity conflated with white supremacy. A.G. Miller notes, “Perkins’s openness to the exploration of faith came in stages after he left the South, joined the army, and eventually settled in the Los Angeles area after his discharge from the military. Perkins’s conversion to Christianity was not an immediate process. He had to leave the South and its extreme environment, racial hatred, prejudice, and oppression in order to find enough mental and physical space to explore more social and spiritual matters.”24 Perkins’s description of his own conversion demonstrates a deeply evangelical experience and the roots of an Evangelical identity. John Perkins began to attend church after he saw “something beautiful develop” in his son, who was attending the Bethlehem Church of Christ Holiness.25 While initially motivated by his son’s burgeoning faith, John Perkins’s conversion would be described as occurring as a result of an encounter with Scripture. As Perkins writes, “I began to enjoy the Bible because of what I was learning about the Apostle Paul, how he endured so much for religion. . . . When I learned that the Apostle Paul was the writer of most of the New Testament books of the Bible, I began to study the Bible myself for the first time.”26 Even before his conversion, he had become a biblicist. Upon his conversion, his activist zeal found expression in evangelistic efforts. “I began to share this inward peace with people in the area where I lived. In about six months’ time I was sharing my life and my testimony in many churches—white and black. . . . And I was teaching children’s Bible classes four or five nights a week.”27 Eventually, Perkins would leave California to return to Mississippi, where he launched Voice of Calvary Ministry (VOCM), which focused on evangelistic efforts in the community, particularly among children. Perkins quickly identified the significant inequity between black kids and white kids in the school system. As a result, he recognized that more was needed than a simple Bible study group for children. According to Perkins, the impact of the gospel needed to extend beyond the simple articulation of the faith. “I knew that if the Bible I was teaching could ever really do something here, it would have to be a visible truth.”28 Perkins would later assert that he did not come back to Mississippi with a “holistic” concept of the Gospel, but found it upon his return.29

African American Evangelicals

81

Perkins’s story of reaching his community with a holistic gospel reached another level of sociocultural engagement in 1970. Living in Mississippi in the 1960s meant that Perkins could not avoid the Civil Rights movement. Perkins attended Civil Rights rallies and VOCM became involved in voter registration drives. His activity, however, troubled the white establishment in the area. Perkins writes that “cars began appearing at night. White men—armed, waiting. Watching for hours at a time, but edging closer and closer. Waiting for any incident to excuse a confrontation.”30 On the evening of February 7, 1970, after a demonstration in Mendenhall, Mississippi, a group of students was arrested as they were returning to Tougaloo College near Jackson. John Perkins, accompanied by Reverend Curry Brown and Joe Paul Buckley, rushed to post bail for those who had been arrested. At the courthouse and jail, they were met by a dozen Mississippi Highway Patrol officers and placed under arrest. Perkins later testified in court that “when I got in the jail Sheriff Jonathan Edwards came over to me right away and said, this is the smart nigger, and this is a new ballgame. . . . He began to beat me, and from that time on they continued beating me, I was just beat to the floor and just punched and just really beaten.”31 Despite the brutality of the beating, Perkins strengthened his Evangelical narrative by extending forgiveness. “I began to see with horror how hate could destroy me. . . . I could try and fight back, as many of my brothers had done. But if I did, how would I be different from the whites who hate? And where would hating get me? . . . The Spirit of God kept working on me and in me until I could say with Jesus, ‘I forgive them, too.’ ”32 Perkins provided Evangelicals with a story of an evangelical Christian involved in the Civil Rights movement, who also proclaimed and demonstrated a gospel of grace. Perkins’s narrative not only inspired individuals but also sparked a movement. Perkins became the galvanizing force for the formation of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA). On February 23, 1989, fifty-three people attended the first CCDA meeting at a hotel near Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The first group of attendees was drawn together by their interest in communicating the gospel and serving the poor, oppressed, and needy. John Perkins emerged as the spiritual and inspirational leader of the group, serving as the chairman of the board. Over the years, CCDA became a recognizable brand among Evangelicals as a place of inspiration and teaching for ministry to the poor and the marginalized. Peter Slade identifies Perkins’s impact as a quiet revolution in the culture wars. More than forty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, Perkins’s unique life story enables a new generation of evangelicals to relocate themselves as participants in the continuing civil rights movement without rejecting their evangelical heritage. In the latest act of this theological drama, we find a theology of the social gospel alive and well in the most surprising of places—as a grassroots movement within the mainstream of American evangelicalism.33

Perkins’s ministry context and his personal experience as an African American allowed him to raise issues that were not broached by Christians from the white majority culture. Perkins spoke on the need for racial reconciliation even after he lived through a physical attack by racists. Perkins’s theological expression, therefore, arose

82

Handbook of African American Theology

out of the context of the African American community but had a broader impact on majority-culture Evangelicalism. In this dual context (growing up as a black man in the South while connected to the larger context of majority-culture Christianity), Perkins could speak out of a real-life experience while understanding the language of majorityculture Christianity.

Circle Church Our final snapshot of the intersection of black and white Evangelicalism is taken from the story of a Chicago church attempting racial integration. The tenuous relationship between blacks and whites attempting to live out the Christian life in an urban church reveals the difficulties of racial integration and reveals underlying themes of power, fear, and mistrust that characterized much of the experiences of black evangelicals in the context of white Evangelicalism. Circle Church launched in February 1967 on the West Side of Chicago. Circle Church went against the norm of American Christianity in the latter half of the twentieth century as an intentionally multi-ethnic church in the urban context. The founding pastor of Circle Church, David Mains, viewed this church planting effort as an important and significant event for the church in America. In Full Circle: The Creative Church for Today’s Society (Mains’s reflections on the fledgling church published in 1971), he reveals his desire “that the church is once again setting the precedent for society rather than having society set the precedent for her.”34 Full Circle revealed Mains’s priorities for Circle Church in its nascent stages. Started when he was just 33 years old, Circle Church became known as a place for innovation and pioneering ministry. Mains had a passion for creative worship and ministry. A key concern for Mains’s founding of Circle Church, therefore, was his desire to see creative and dynamic worship services. As the church grew, Mains sought to develop curricula to be used by other churches that would foster creative worship. By the mid-1970s, Mains had begun exploring the hiring of staff to roll out what would come to be known as “Step Two.”35 Step Two would be marketed to other churches that wanted to learn from the creative worship expressions of Circle Church. Mains’s lasting legacy has not been in the establishment of one of the pioneering multi-ethnic churches in America, but as a pioneer of creative worship. While Full Circle seemed to prioritize creative worship and church growth and renewal, it was the church’s multi-ethnic composition that drew significant attention. Mains was concerned about the church’s response to social issues in contrast to many of his contemporaries. There was intentionality to plant the church in an urban location, to reach the poor and the oppressed, and to be a multi-ethnic church.36 While church members saw the value of the creative worship experience at Circle Church, for the African Americans in the church the real attraction of the church was the open church concept. “The open church concept basically meant that a multiethnic congregation was not to assimilate but rather was to mutually share in the life of the church”37 Open church provided the grid through which disempowered African Americans could engage in a church that still maintained a white majority.38

African American Evangelicals

83

Open church also means that the church not only says welcome to other ethnic groups; it encourages multi-ethnicity and makes necessary changes in the congregation to provide an open opportunity to express their cultural dynamic in all aspects of the church.39

One of the expressions of the multi-ethnic church at Circle Church was the formation of a multi-ethnic pastoral staff. Mains writes: Our congregation was very open to hiring a black man. Because we were so young, much of the prejudice and inhibitions an older group might have demonstrated simply did not exist, or if they did, were being dealt with by the individuals who held them. We wanted an integrated church.40

Circle Church hired Mel Warren as the first African American staff member in 1968. When Warren left Circle Church, Clarence Hilliard was hired. Clarence Hilliard was born and raised in Buffalo. Prior to his move to Chicago, Hilliard had been ordained in the National Baptist denomination. He was active in the community, working in school integration and housing rights. Clarence Hilliard originally came to Chicago to pursue a seminary education at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS). Within months of his arrival in Chicago, he would be hired as a pastor at Circle Church.41 Circle Church had difficulty keeping even the small number of blacks at the church. The demographics of Circle Church reveals the white population to be 80–90 percent of the church. Hilliard initially saw his job as keeping blacks from leaving the church and believed it to be “a ‘Mickey Mouse job’ for the first couple of years. . . . It was communicated almost as a babysitting job—holding on to the Blacks that attended.” A couple of years after his arrival, “Hilliard realized that Circle was truly interested in a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic church.” Hilliard diagnosed that blacks were leaving because “Circle was too White. . . . their worship, music, and preaching were not inclusive or representative of the Black community.”42 As an African American evangelical, Hilliard was influenced by the ethos of the NBEA. He served the NBEA as the head of the social concerns committee and at a later point served as the Vice President of the NBEA. While holding to an evangelical theology, he was also a leader in Operation PUSH and would often reflect the burgeoning African American evangelical theology that was conservative but reflected a high black identity and a deep concern for social justice. For Hilliard, Circle Church’s vision of being an open church provided the motivation and focus for his ministry.43 He believed that to be true to the open church concept the church needed to embrace an evangelical black theology.44 The priorities of Mains and Hilliard were at odds from very early in their working relationship. Circle Church was becoming a church with two competing visions. Whether “Open Church” or “Step Two” would serve as the driving vision seemed to be an underlying conflict between the two pastors. Circle Church was significant not only as an innovative church but as a church with social-historical importance. Was integration possible among evangelical Christians?

84

Handbook of African American Theology

Could blacks and whites worship together? Clarence Hilliard’s presence raised the stakes for Circle Church. Could a strong black identity be accepted among white evangelicals? The trajectory of black evangelicalism would intersect with white Evangelicalism in this significant moment in the specific context of this local church. Starting in the fall of 1975 and into the early months of 1976, the young church would encounter a crisis that would cripple the church and ultimately alter its course. It would result in the firing of the church’s African American pastor, the resignation of the church’s only African American elder, and the subsequent departure of all the African Americans at Circle Church. “The Crisis,” as it came to be known, stemmed from a series of conflicts that emerged on the staff, the board, and among congregation. As the founding pastor of the church, Mains had requested from the board that clarification be given over the roles of the staff. Eventually, he would request that he be officially established as the Senior Pastor.45 In particular, Mains wanted to exert full authority over the Sunday worship services. While Mains did not preach every Sunday, he established an approval process for all sermons preached at the church. Hilliard was concerned that the worship services were too white. Being an open church meant that all the races should be allowed to contribute to the worship service.46 To live into the open church concept, he said, the Blacks of Circle Church mapped out what they saw as significant [ways] to produce a “soul experience.” First, they needed a soul choir and a Black choir director. Secondly, they wanted the Black preacher to do more preaching.47

Mains wanted to maintain authority over the worship service as the Senior Pastor. Hilliard, however, saw conflict developing out of the lack of willingness to adhere to the open church concept. Mains control over the service in the pursuit of “Step Two” meant the absence of concern for the African Americans at Circle Church, which would be in violation of “Open Church.” In the fall of 1975, Hilliard proposed to preach a sermon titled “The Funky Gospel.” He wanted to push the congregation towards an understanding and even an embracing of black theology. The sermon proclaimed that “Christ came into the world as the ultimate ‘nigger’ of the universe.” Hilliard expressed a deep discontent with the white Evangelical appropriation and application of the gospel. What is it that we evangelicals have been preaching? I said at the outset that we have been preaching a honky Christ to a hungry world. This honky Christ has no content; he does not come to the dispossessed. We preach a honky Christ of easy salvation.48

Hilliard believed that this sermon moved them towards Open Church, as the previously silenced black voices in the church would be allowed to speak the fullness of a realized black identity and theology. “The Crisis” began when Hilliard was prohibited from preaching this sermon. A series of meetings occurred between the staff, the elder board, and certain members of the congregation. Multiple conversations occurred that revolved around not only the

African American Evangelicals

85

preaching of the “Funky Gospel” sermon, but also who had the authority over the sermon, the worship service, and the church.49 David Mains asserted his authority as the lead pastor to determine the key direction of the worship and the sermons. Hilliard and a subset of the church identified as the “Black Fellowship” wanted more input on the service. At the December 9, 1975 Elders Meeting, David Mains stated that he “was unable to see any possible way of staff working together at this point.” Clarence Hilliard “felt he could continue to work as a part of staff only if he was free to preach the messages he feels God has given to him and if a situation arises in staff where he feels a need to have additional black input he be allowed to bring additional blacks into the discussion.”50 At the December 15, 1975 Elders Meeting, “It was decided that the elders should ask for Clarence’s resignation and the reason would be because there is a lack of communication and confidence between Clarence and the Elders.”51 Seven votes affirmed the decision, two votes abstained, and one vote withdrew.52 The Elder minutes defined “withdrew” as withdrawing “from the question if you don’t feel you can support the decision, but feel it is important enough to make the decision. This would mean you would have to withdraw from the elders.”53 The “withdraw” came from Russ Knight, Circle Church’s only African American elder. At the end of the process, despite the strong protestation by blacks at the church (in the form of an additional eight-page letter), Hilliard was fired54 while Mains was reinstated. The letter from the black fellowship, dated December 20, stated concern over favoritism shown to Mains by the Elders, Mains’s forcing authority over the Sunday morning services and the prohibition of preaching “The Funky Gospel,” unfair treatment towards the black children of the church, the superior attitude of whites towards blacks, the lack of black elders, and a complete disregard for the concerns of blacks at Circle Church. The Black Fellowship left Circle Church. Clarence Hilliard would plant Austin Corinthian Baptist Church (ACBC) in the Austin neighborhood on the west side of Chicago. David Mains would continue as the Senior Pastor of Circle Church for another year before resigning in 1977. He would eventually find fame in Evangelical circles for his radio program, Chapel on the Air, which he directed from 1977 to 1995. Mains would proceed to author numerous books. His biography at his ministry website acknowledged that he “received an honorary doctorate for his role in contributing to the life of the national church; . . . established the daily television show You Need to Know . . . and in 1995 won the distinguished TV Programmer of the Year award from the National Religious Broadcasters; . . . [and] formed Mainstay Church Resources in 1996 to provide sermon series helps for local pastors.”55 Mains’s contributions to Evangelicalism would be acknowledged with the archiving of his papers in the Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections. For many in the African American evangelical community, the failure of Circle Church signaled another incident of black evangelicals being rejected by white evangelicals. What compounded matters for black evangelicals was that these were the “good white people,” yet there were “significant blind spots”56 for even progressive white evangelicals in relating to their African American counterparts. The Circle Church story reveals the great gulf that was difficult to bridge among black and white evangelicals, even in the midst of positive intentions and great promise.

86

Handbook of African American Theology

Conclusion US Evangelicalism holds to a self-perception of perspicuity and a self-elevation as the vanguard of Christian orthodoxy. At the same time, the history of Evangelicalism reveals a long pattern of inability to deal with cultural changes and an inability to address corporate issues, such as systemic racism. The boundaries of US Evangelicalism are often tightly drawn with an absence of engagement with other streams of American Christianity such as the historic black church. One of the solutions to address this gulf has been to encourage non-white Christians to enact and perform whiteness, demonstrating the dysfunctional theological principle that salvific viability is rooted in approximating whiteness. But even this expectation has proven inadequate as African Americans who demonstrated every attribute required to earn the methaphorical Evangelical card have been rejected. Echoing Evangelical theology, graduation from Evangelical educational institutions, participation in Evangelical parachurch ministries, and speaking and writing to an Evangelical audience has not insured inclusion in the Evangelical world. Race still trumps theology in a negative way in the Evangelical world. At critical junctures in the history of US Evangelicalism, opportunities to intersect with another branch of Christianity, African American evangelicals, were presented. Part of the failure of the late twentieth-century Evangelical discourse on race was the failure to fully engage a community with numerous points of theological affinity, but arising from a different social context. This disconnect with black evangelicals was not in theological categories that would typically matter to Evangelicals, but a failure of the theological imagination. White Evangelicalism could not expand community to include those of “different” and “other” flesh despite agreement on the central theological issues. The failure of the imagination to see “the other” as offering a positive contribution to the existing boundaries allowed white Evangelicalism to continue undisturbed by the presence of African American evangelicals.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

Faith Bailey, Adoniram Judson: America’s First Foreign Missionary (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 1999). Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 6, 11, 223. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945), 415. Unless otherwise specified, the above paragraph draws from Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, TN: Nelson Reference and Electronic, 2006), 17–86; from Estrella Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 15–27; and from Grant Wacker, Heaven Below (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 226–35. Luis Segreda, “Evangelization and the Holy Spirit in an Urban and Multicultural Society: The Experience of the Pro-Human Rights Ecumenical Committee,” in All Together in One Place: Theological Papers from the Brighton Conference on World

African American Evangelicals

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

87

Evangelization, edited by Harold D. Hunter and Peter D. Hocken (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 136 Alexander, Black Fire, 138. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 20. William Pannell, “The Religious Heritage of Blacks” in The Evangelicals edited by David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge (New York: Abingdon Press, 1975), 99. James Earl Massey, “The Unrepeatable Tom Skinner,” Christianity Today (September 12, 1994), http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1994/september12/4ta011.html (accessed December 10, 2015.) William Bentley, National Black Evangelical Association: Evolution of a Concept of Ministry. Rev. edn. (Chicago: self-published, 1979), 146. Miller, “The Rise of African-American Evangelicalism,” 262. Ibid., 263. Pannell, interview. Miller, “The Rise of African-American Evangelicalism,” 263. Ibid., 266. Bentley, National Black Evangelical Association, 17. Russ Knight, interview by author, March 23, 2010 and April 20, 2010, Chicago, IL. Bentley, National Black Evangelical Association, 10. Gilbreath, “A Prophet Out of Harlem.” Ibid. Johnny Skinner, Tom’s brother, recalls that he served Vivian with divorce papers a year after the death of their mother, putting the divorce in the late 1970s. Their separation probably occurred at an earlier time. (John Skinner, interview by author, March 9, 2016, by phone from Knoxville, TN.) Gilbreath, “A Prophet Out of Harlem.” Miller, “Black Apostle to White Evangelicals,” 9. John Perkins, A Quiet Revolution (Pasadena, CA: Urban Family, 1976), 18. Perkins, A Quiet Revolution, 19. Ibid., 20. Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down, 93. Perkins, interview. Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down, 118. Ibid., 154–62. Ibid., 204–205. Peter Slade, “A Quiet Revolution and the Culture Wars,” in Mobilizing for the Common Good, 60. Mains, Full Circle, 9. Knight, interview. One of Mains’s early teachings at the church emphasized the values of ministering to the poor and the oppressed. Mains also taught on the kingdom of God, which would reflect his social justice emphasis. Ortiz, “Circle Church: A Case Study in Contextualization,” 9. According to former church members Russ Knight and Peter Sjoblom, the African American population at Circle Church never exceeded 15 percent. Ortiz, “Circle Church: A Case Study in Contextualization,” 9. Mains, Full Circle, 40. Phil Hilliard, interview by author, March 3, 2016, Chicago, IL, tape recording.

88 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Handbook of African American Theology Ortiz, “Circle Church: A Case Study in Contextualization,” 8. Knight, interview. Ortiz, “Circle Church: A Case Study in Contextualization,” 10. Knight, interview. Peter Sjoblom, interview by author, March 23, 2010 and April 20, 2010, Chicago, IL. See also Circle Church Elders, “October 20, 1975 Meeting Minutes,” asking the staff “to deal with the concept of Senior Pastor.” See also a reference in the December 20, 1975 letter from the black members of Circle Church questioning the decision to establish David Mains’s authority over all the worship services. Russ Knight asserts that Mains preferred classical music over soul music. In addition, Mains’s desire to launch “Step Two” meant that he wanted stricter control over the Sunday service (Knight, interview). Ortiz, “Circle Church: A Case Study in Contextualization,” 8. Hilliard, “Funky Gospel.” Circle Church Elders, “Chronological Events through the Crisis,” 1–3. Circle Church Elders, “December 9, 1975 Meeting Minutes.” Circle Church Elders, “December 15, 1975 Meeting Minutes,” 4. Circle Church Elders, “December 15, 1975 Meeting Minutes,” 4–5. Circle Church Elders, “December 15, 1975 Meeting Minutes,” 4. Circle Church Elders, “January 5, 1976 Letter to Clarence Hilliard.” Mainstay Ministries, “About David Mains.” Knight, interview and Sjoblom, interview.

7

The Classroom and Pulpit of the Public Theologian: A Brief Survey of Black Faith Tradition(s) Adam L. Bond

Within black Christian traditions, public theology has participated in the shaping of certain activist forms of religious practice. Coupled with liberationist notions of theopolitical rhetoric and action, the trajectory of black public theology has spanned the ideas and activism of people such as Nat Turner and Sojourner Truth to Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, Jr.—not to forget the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement. Some people may recognize these names, and a host of others, in the timelines of American history. Through documentaries and recent films, these persons are portrayed as leaders of a larger freedom struggle. They were people of deep faith who embraced freedom as the ideal for which they would die. These prophetic visionaries understood the power of this ideal and translated it for their people in public spaces and forums.1 A certain type of Christian faith informed their sermons and speeches, their strategies and demonstrations. It was more than a notion that inspired them to sacrifice their all to be proponents of a moral principle that affirmed their personhood. Peter J. Paris named it the “prophetic principle” of the black Christian tradition. Defined simply as the belief in the parenthood of God and the kinship of all people, this non-racist principle stood as the foundation of black personhood and the rationale for social action. This principle has been the basis for and justification of numerous methods of protest. And, historically, the principle has clarified the mission of black churches: The black churches in the United States have been the historical embodiment of a global fight for black liberation; even in the face of racism. The non-racist love principle was a biblical standard and a theological fact for many African American Christians. Their belief in this premise (i.e., the parenthood of God and kinship of all humanity) constitutes their particularity in American religious history. Black churches have attempted to reconcile their faith in a God of freedom with the activism needed to face the pandemic racism of every period of history. This mediation has always constituted the mission of the black churches to the larger American society.2

90

Handbook of African American Theology

By definition, black Christianity has produced a public theology that negotiates between the piety and public witness of the black church as a communal institution.3 In many instances, the black public theologian grows up in this institution and society. She or he is a product of their historical circumstances and institutional quirks. Public theology does not reside only in the pulpits of the congregations and church conventions. It is not limited to the streets wherein public theologians make their case to broader publics where they use makeshift tents and podiums to proclaim a prophetic word. African American public theology resides also in the classrooms of academic institutions, forged through the intentional call to tear down the divide between sacred and secular. Black public theologians leverage the uneasy partnership between black churches and theological education—formal or informal—to confront racism and build real human community.

A working definition of public theology Public theology at its core is a commitment to engaging in dialogue in the public sphere(s) by informing and persuading diverse publics engage through religious principles that invite humanity to be its best self.4 The public theologian, then, has a vocation that entails the leveraging of her or his faith for the salvation of human community. This saving faith engages civic and political discourse through its focus on the inherent dignity and worth of each person. However contested that notion of personhood may be, the public theologian engages in conversations about policy and its politics, values and morals, and notions of “the good.” The range of the dialogue in public theology spans the breadth of those matters that affect human flourishing. The good, as defined by God, becomes the standard that establishes the goal that the public theologian strives to reach. For Christian communities and theologians, this goal is birthed in the good news—the gospel—as proclaimed in the Christian scriptures by Jesus as Christ. Other religious traditions may engage the public square with similar approaches. This essay, however, is limited to the intellectual shape and intentional practices of the broader black Christian tradition(s). To be sure, black Christians, in general, have found themselves employing public theology as a full-time vocation in the United States since their arrival on this land. Eventually appropriating the tools and language of the biblical texts, applying the logic and mother wit of their folk religion, and/or baptizing the jargon of the academy, the public theology of black people has made its way from pulpit and print into the mainstream of American life. Public theology within American Christianity has either transgressed or complemented the nation-state, supporting and/or feuding with a creeping imperialism that has made militarism, capitalism, and “Christian” nationalism, with its resulting racism, the civil religion of the United States. At different points in the history of the country, Christians advocated for or against the symptoms of this trinity. On one hand, abolitionists and temperance advocates participated in a form of public theology. On the other hand, pamphlets and lectures by pro-slavery preachers became instant expert opinion to support the institution slavery. African American clergy-theologians would eventually create a formal discourse that was nurtured in the halls of colleges and universities.

Classroom and Pulpit

91

The historical convergence of the church and the classroom As independent African American congregations emerged during the late eighteenth century into the early portion of the nineteenth century, black ministers would eventually start and lead these communities. While white ministers led many of these churches in the South during the antebellum period, numerous African American “exhorters” and ministers were assisting with or taking on the primary pastoral duties of preaching and teaching. By the dawn of the Civil War, some southern congregations had black pastoral leaders in place—with little to no supervision.5 Several northern churches had more freedom, with African American pastors leading their churches throughout this period. By the end of the war, home mission societies in Protestant denominations saw it as their missionary duty to educate the newly freed African Americans in the South. Ralph Reavis notes that these northern missionaries went south with clarity of purpose and the support of their organizations and sponsors: The roar of the cannon and clash of arms had scarcely died away when the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern white groups—some Baptist, some Methodist, some Roman Catholic, some from other denominations, but all backed by their churches and many by well-meaning philanthropists—began assisting the four million emancipated blacks in the south. By 1867, few towns in the conquered areas were without schools for blacks. These schools were managed mainly by northern teachers and supported by northern philanthropists and Missionary Associations.6

Among Baptists alone, schools popped up across the southern states to fulfill the mission of emancipation. Beverly Clark Carlson writes: By the turn of the century, twenty-seven schools for Freed People had been established or assisted by the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the Woman’s American Baptist Home Mission Society. These schools were common schools, industrial institutes, academies, preparatory schools, colleges, seminaries and universities. Many had boarding facilities; a few did not, but each in its own way addressed the urgent need of the people in the area in which it was established.7

The northern missionaries were armed with this desire and the resources to develop these schools. And what they started would take on a form that was often adopted and transformed by the black teachers and families who benefited from the education. These teachers and families turned their homes and classrooms into spaces that modeled the specific values and customs their communities forged and transmitted. In other words, the education of the missionaries was appropriated quickly to prepare African American children for some of the social and emotional consequences that resulted from living in a racist society. The people, faith commitments, and theological sources that often informed the vocation of the black public theologian of the twentieth century resided in segregated schools, communities, and churches. The plague of

92

Handbook of African American Theology

racism aided in producing environments that sought to insulate black children from white hatred and violence. The results were a nationalist enterprise of building churches and schools that taught African American youth and adults how to negotiate the world around them. Samuel DeWitt Proctor (1921–97), the renowned preacher and educational leader, was a by-product of the missionary thrust of the post-bellum period. Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia in the 1920s and 30s, he was only a generation or so removed from the influence of the mission schools. His parents were graduates of the Norfolk Mission College (Presbyterian). Proctor’s paternal grandmother graduated from the Hampton Institute, now Hampton University (American Missionary Association). And Proctor graduated from Virginia Union University (Northern Baptist, now American Baptist) in 1942. He became the president of the institution in 1955. Describing his early education, Proctor stated that church and school joined forces in his experience. For whatever reason, our Huntersville schools saved us from a sense of futility and prepared us to hold our heads high in the midst of the daily insults. Our education was so grounded in religious faith and practice that the flavor of the gospel was laced all through our schooling.8

He also acknowledged that the same people who taught him in Sunday school would be in the front of the classroom of the public school during the week. The adults of Proctor’s generation understood the power of the classroom to shape the morals and values of the youth. They were fighting to save their future. Theologically, this approach to education wed the church to the curriculum of life for the African American community. Because God desired the good, an antiracist community that affirmed the kinship and equality of humanity, black children had no reason to lose heart or faith. Writing in a 1927 article for the Home Mission College Review, Howard Thurman (1899–1981) provided the rationale for cultivating African American theology in the classrooms of higher education. Thurman’s article “Higher Education and Religion” described the creative tension that exists between the apocalyptic imagination of African American folk religion and the “new body of factual materials” made available by the education in colleges and universities.9 The Home Mission College Review was a publication of the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS), employing as its authors notable faculty members and administrators from the home mission schools. The editors also included materials from members within the Society to explain the ongoing work of its educational mission. The periodical was an organ for serious conversation about black education and religion. Thurman’s article was timely, as many of the institutions founded by the ABHMS had not reached the century mark. To be sure, the dialogue between religion and education in such formal settings was still a young activity among African American students and professors. The Home Mission College Review became a popular place for shaping “mission” and vision around these important aspects of black culture—religion and education. Thurman used his article to claim that folk religion made it difficult for black youth to engage the world with their faith as a guide. Much of what they were learning in school, he argued, conflicted with the lived religion of their families. He termed the

Classroom and Pulpit

93

faith of folk religion apocalyptic, as it embraced an afterlife as a reward for faithful living. The language that described the “kingdom to come” made sense of the daily suffering and oppression experienced by black people. Thurman wrote: The procession of early Negro preachers found themselves leading their hosts through a wilderness of suffering, oppression, and cruelty. The odds appeared to be so overwhelmingly against them that there was well nigh nothing in the contemporary situation worthy of salvaging. Therefore, with marvelous insight, these prophets of patience turned their attention to the hope beyond this world and found great refuge in the promises of the Holy Book. Here we find apocalypticism at its best. God is the Real, the present world can give no peace. The slave who died in Christ would rise to “shout all over God’s heaven.”

Thurman acknowledges that the “folk religion” of enslaved and oppressed Africans and African Americans sometimes pointed to ethereal realms for relief and justification of existence. For Thurman, this type of religion concludes in a barrier between religion and life. People become less concerned about changing the conditions of their existence, because life is a transition point to the afterlife. Thurman believed that this stunts the growth of the individual. One does not know how to live fully or function as nature requires a human being to develop. This reliance upon the apocalyptic also creates an artificial barrier between religion and life. People are prone to section off what they do in public from what they practice in private, Thurman claimed. He stated, “The manifestations of religion under such circumstances tend to be more theological than ethical.”10 Folk religion, however, was not without its merits. Thurman noted that it produced powerful symbolism for the black faith and sustained people during an unbearable time in history. Thurman saw a stark contrast in the emerging religion of African American people who were educated in the schools. Although he celebrated the access to knowledge, he was concerned that black youth and black churches were modeling their goals upon white people. He traced the problem to a conflict in the systems of higher education. African American young adults were learning more facts about the world and about themselves. They discovered that current social and economic conditions were not a product of divine sanction, they were socio-economic conditions created by persons who were enticed by greed. The education black young adults received in higher education also taught them about their ability to learn, acquire new knowledge, and thrive in the world. This knowledge, moreover, became the product of a collective of African American people. The eyes of black youth were opening at the same time in classrooms across the South and Southeast. They realized that they are more than what they have been told by white oppressors and by the religion that they have practiced. The conflict, then, invited them to make choices about how black people should engage the world. Thurman stated: Often this consciousness results in profound bitterness and cynicism because of the injustice of the present order, and there is little left of the apocalyptic hope to comfort and to bless. Many are saying that the group has been given a kind of

94

Handbook of African American Theology religion that points from the world while their neighbors have secured more than a gentleman’s share of this world’s goods.11

Thurman saw a religion of materialism as the inevitable consequence of this conflict. He believed that black youth could find themselves captured by a quest for the “domination of things” rather than living into the finest aspects of the human spirit. Religion, for Thurman, must not be a private affair that fails to guide one’s ethics in the larger world—especially in the economy of things. For religion, the task of education is to wed the classroom and the pulpit. He resolved that four critical practices can create the kind of cultural relevance that makes sense of education for people who ground their lives in a religious perspective. These practices assist in translating the value and significance of religion for educated people. Thurman argued: 1. We must refuse to be caught in the current demand for things and must find our security in the reality of God and the spiritual tasks to which He has set our hands. 2. We must put a vast faith in the contagion in the Spirit of Jesus rather than in the building of organizations to perpetuate his Spirit. 3. We must seek to demolish the artificial barrier between religion and life. 4. We must not allow any phase of human knowledge to lie outside our province, but must provide a creative synthesis, in the light of which all the facts of science or whatnot may be viewed.12

Thurman later identified these points as the “Task of the Negro Ministry.”13 The black preacher, as Thurman saw it, is responsible for developing, preaching and teaching the “creative synthesis” that brings together the sacred and the secular. In a 1928 essay about Christian ministry for African American clergy leaders, Thurman expounded the ideas that he offered in the Home Mission College Review. Again noting the economic disparities between white people and African Americans who emerged from slavery, Thurman rationalized the black quest for capital. He criticized, however, a faith in a religion of things. The desire for “social security” outweighed, for some black people, a security in God’s existence. The black preacher calls people back to account. Thurman wrote: He must interpret the deadening effect upon American life of the growing dependence upon things and what they may accomplish. He must lay bare the awful truth that where the highest premium is put upon the possession of things, human life is relatively cheapened. And where life is cheap, ideals languish and the souls of men slowly die.14

Thurman invited the preacher to see the church as the place wherein and the pulpit as the platform from which serious dialogue would take place about life in a society addicted to money/materials. He also cautioned preachers not to confuse the spirit of Jesus with organization building. Thurman could not justify the march to build bigger cathedrals and sanctuaries if those structures were to become the aim of the religion. As

Classroom and Pulpit

95

he put it, the contagion of Jesus’s spirit is bigger than any one organization or building. The real change in society happens “by contact with another life.” No organization can replace the power of the human encounter; this is what Jesus embodied. The final two points of his reflection on the “tasks” of the African American ministry provide a sense of Thurman’s real call for a public theology. Thurman stated that as black ministers “We must seek to demolish the artificial barrier between religion and life.” He was intent upon moving belief and practice away from overemphasizing otherworldly aspirations. That emphasis may have had its place and time in the history of black people. But Thurman saw it as a shift from the core of the Christian faith, the ethics of Jesus. The African American preacher lives in a world in which the questions and findings of science, the politics of the nation, and the volatility of the market present competing claims about what it means to be a human being. Revealing his commitments to a black social gospel tradition, Thurman claimed: The Negro minister must find how to interpret life in terms of a creative expansive idealism. Therefore, he must be a student. For instance, he must know what the problem of evolution is and must be prepared to think clear through it with the anxious ones who share their doubts with him. He must be aware of the findings in all the major fields of human knowledge and interpret their meaning in terms of the Kingdom of God.15

Implicit in Thurman’s lesson is the prerequisite for a public theology. For him, the black preacher must be critically engaged and conscious. She or he must be culturally literate and theologically adept. Thurman saw this equipment as necessary for the “spiritual rebirth” of a people—a race—who were facing a new world that would remain hostile to their presence and needs.

The ongoing confrontation of racism and religion Public theology finds both definition and purpose in a reflection written by black Catholic theologian M. Shawn Copeland. In her article “Racism and the Vocation of the Theologian,” Copeland offers a clarion call of purpose for the theologian in a postSeptember 11th world.16 She notes that the acts of terror committed on and after that day remind us of the fissures that exist in a racialized United States of America. Copeland says that the challenge beckons the theologian to make sense of the problems that exist in society. She writes: In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, theology can make a contribution not only by exposing ways in which structures and systems are disordered and deformed, but also by turning a light on the ultimate and transcendent solution to the problem of evil, to the realization of a common human good.17

Copeland is clear about theology’s potential contributions to conversations in the public sphere. She questions, however, what the response will be from theologians. For

96

Handbook of African American Theology

her, the question is one of vocation. What is the commitment that theologians have to the “struggle for authentic human liberation from within our culture?” This line of questioning leads Copeland to an analysis of white supremacy. She notes that racism is destructive. Its categories and systems mangle spirituality and create fallacious definitions of human difference. Borrowing from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s study of racial formation in the US, Copeland argues that we cannot avoid seeing race in our everyday lives. Critical to her examination of racial formation is the way in which white supremacy consciously avoids information that may correct its assumptions and biases. These biases, then, contribute to the pervasive stereotypes that refuse to die when perceiving different racial and ethnic non-white groups. To be sure, Copeland writes, the bias of white supremacy played out in visceral and violent ways after the attacks of 9/11. She cites several instances in which “badges of American citizenship” could not save Sikh and Lebanese people from violence and harassment. Notions of racial value informed these acts. White privilege is global, she says, and it plays out in the form of racism. That racism is a threat “to the creation and development of human community, to the flourishing of the Spirit in human lives, to the realization of the body of Christ, to the reign of God.” She sees racism as a threat to the religion of Jesus. Racism invites real Christianity to suppress its liberating elements, to co-opt the self-effacing tendencies of a nationalism that takes pride in the moniker “melting pot.” The theologian can offer an alternative invitation. Copeland is candid about her choice of words to describe the work of the theologian. She explains that her use of the word “vocation” signals the type of discipline and commitment required to do the work. She acknowledges that theology is a rigorous academic discipline. Theology also has as its foundation a commitment to Truth “who is the crucified Jesus.” The theologian, then, is called to intellectual research and study and a faith steeped in the exploration of mystery and love. She states candidly that the theologian’s call is one that confronts culture and questions the church. In this way, Copeland and Thurman are in agreement about the task of the theologian/minister. The vocation of the theologian is a call to uplift marginalized members of society by being/writing/speaking/doing the truth of God’s word. The ability to live into that call is fostered in communities of faith, not just in the academy; and vice versa. As evidence of the ongoing need for theology in this age, Copeland listed several “signs of the time” that require specific attention from the theologian. She listed several “irruptions of racism” from what is now the last three decades that make clear the fight that theology faces. She cites incidents such as the beating of Rodney King and the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo (who was shot 41 times by police officers as he reached for his wallet). She also mentions the influence of the Willie Horton (a black Massachusetts prison inmate) ads on the 1988 election between Michael Dukakis and George Herbert Walker Bush. For Copeland, these signs require from theologians a truth telling that unmasks the racism that is always at work in American society. The theologian, then, is called to participate in the ongoing confrontation between racism and religion by doing the following things: 1. Giving critical scholarly attention to understanding the reach and extent of white privilege.

Classroom and Pulpit

97

2. Retuning and refining our sensitivity to American public discourse about liberty, justice, and equality. 3. Obliging the renewal of scholarly attention on the part of Catholic theologians to Catholic social teachings.18 Though the last point is a specific call to persons within the Catholic tradition, it serves the purpose for the larger black “catholic” church. In nurturing this vocation, Copeland instructs the public theologian to consider what is at stake: We do theology because we want to collaborate fundamentally in bringing about a different kind of world in the here-and-now. Our contribution to this project is to think about that world in light of the eschatological future that only God can give. We advocate for the reign of God. Our ultimate commitment can never be to any system or structure, person or group, church or university, but only to the God of Jesus Christ. His prophetic praxis, in the face of certain death, demonstrates the risk and meaning of a life lived in prayerful hope.19

These comments provide a fitting description of the vocation of the public theologian and the urgency of her/his work from pulpit and classroom, alike.

Conclusion The classroom and pulpit of black public theologians have found themselves merged over the course of history. In conversation and conflict with the racism of white supremacist systems, public theology was an inevitable product of black prophetic religion, the “Christianities” of people who waged war against the dehumanizing principles of an irrational ideology. Black public theologians have committed themselves to a vocation that has transcended denominations and institutions for the sake of real human community. The transcripts of a black public theology show that this has not come without the coaching and prodding of those persons who could/can identify the “cry in the wilderness” of American society; finding themselves willing to accept the call to action.

Notes 1

2

Nate Parker’s depiction of Nat Turner in “Birth of a Nation” reminds the viewer of the intentional ways in which Turner negotiated language to cast a vision of freedom for his listening public. One can only imagine the real meeting after the meeting to consider his theological case for action. This statement does not condone the violence that Turner committed. It only highlights what the author and subject of the Confessions of Nat Turner allude to in that text. See Birth of a Nation, directed by Nate Parker (2016; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2017), Blu-ray. Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 10–11.

98 3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Handbook of African American Theology See Raphael G. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety and Public Witness (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Warnock provides the reader with an accurate assessment of what I have named the “Enduring Tension” of black Christian churches and denominations. For some reason, congregations and congregants feel forced to choose between a theology that saves the individual (evangelical) and one that saves the community (liberation). This debate has been waged in religious literature and curricula, at denominational conventions, and in academic classrooms. Warnock outlines the middle ground in his important text. See Victor Anderson, “Contour of An African American Public Theology,” Journal of Theology 104 (2000): 49–67. Victor Anderson’s work informs my definition of public theology. He writes, “I describe public theology as the deliberate use of religious languages and commitments to influence substantive public discourse, including public debates on morals.” Anderson goes on to distinguish its place within academic discourse. He sees the academic theologian as a participant in holding political communities accountable. Public theology is the moral corrective that identifies violations of human democratic fulfillment, pushing political communities to adapt and adjust policy as needed. Anderson reminds people that the academy is a part of the “real world,” as it includes people who are governed by the same systems and structures as everyone else. Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1973; 1998), 101–2. Ralph Reavis, Sr., “Black Higher Education Among American Baptists in Virginia: From the Slave Pen to the University,” American Baptist Quarterly 11, no. 4 (December 1992). Beverly Clark Carlson, “Pursuit of the Promise: An Overview,” American Baptist Quarterly 12, no. 1 (March 1993): 3. Samuel Proctor, My Moral Odyssey (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1991), 45. Howard Thurman, “Higher Education and Religion,” The Home Mission College Review 1, no. 2 (November 1927): 22–6. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 25–6. See Thurman, “The Task of the Negro Ministry,” 193–4. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 199. M. Shawn Copeland, “Racism and the Vocation of the Christian Theologian,” Spiritus 2 (2002): 15–29. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 24–5. Ibid., 26.

Further reading Anderson, Victor. Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology, Religion and American Public Life. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998.

Classroom and Pulpit

99

Cannon, Katie Geneva. Teaching Preaching: Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2007. Copeland, M. Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009. Evans, James H., Jr. We Have Been Believers: An African-American Systematic Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992. Fluker, Walter Earl, ed. The Stones that the Builders Rejected: The Development of Ethical Leadership from the Black Church Tradition. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998. Harris, James H. Pastoral Theology: A Black-Church Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. Townes, Emilie M. In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.

Part Two

Theological Method and Construction

8

The Hebrew Bible and Black Theology: Fresh Hermeneutical Considerations for Liberation Theologies and Situating the Teachings of Jesus Harold V. Bennett

Introduction The problem Why is the Hebrew Bible (hereafter cited as HB) such a complex, but essential, document for African American theologians and social ethicists to use in their quests to understand the ideas and teachings of Jesus and other writers whose points of view appear in the New Testament (hereafter cited as NT)? A significant source of the problem is that the HB is a small library, i.e., an anthology of books from ancient Israel, and each tome has its history of growth and issues it seeks to address. The different volumes in this body of literature rehearse traditional legends, articulate ideas, restate historical accounts, promulgate moral teachings, and tell stories about prominent figures in ancient Israelite folklore. The HB is an assortment of writings, which come from the hands of several contributors espousing very different worldviews and foci. It is not a single volume written by one author, regardless of whether we define “author” as one individual, a school, or as a camp, which produced all these books in one, single socioeconomic, religious, or political setting.1 The lore that is in the HB appears in diverse literary genres, including but not limited to the following: legends, myths, laws, maxims, battle reports, prophecies, fables, poems, historical reports, hymns, laments, poems of thanksgiving, and enthronement poems. In the HB are layers of literature, which cast light on individuals who are of extreme importance for understanding ideas and tropes in other Abrahamic faith traditions. Islam immediately comes to mind, for Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Moses, David, and Solomon appear in the HB, and legends associated with these figures receive attention in the Qur’an. The HB also contains accounts of Hagar, Asenath, Moses’s Ethiopian wife, the Queen of Sheba, Candace, and other African women who are at the center of considerable discussions in non-traditional conversations about the African presence in the HB. Within the academy and in local religious communities, the HB is the focus of much debate by scholars, theologians, lay-persons, clerics, and moral philosophers who involve themselves in liberation

104

Handbook of African American Theology

ethics and formulate programs that seek to enhance the circumstances in some of the most distressed communities in America and elsewhere in the world. In short, the HB is a literary potpourri. This complicates using it as a backdrop against which to appreciate Africentric theologizing and moral philosophizing and to understand the ideas and moral theorizing of Jesus, Paul, and John, and other writers who produced much of the literature that emerged from the Jesus movement and is in the NT.

The thesis How can African American theologians and social ethicists approach the HB so that the angle of vision they have on it illuminates the theological and moral ideas of Jesus and other writers in the NT? This essay argues that a hermeneutic for reading the HB, recognizing and building upon the theological and moral heterogeneity and ideological conditioning in texts in the HB, has the philosophical capital to enhance the ability of African American theologians and social ethicists to understand the teachings of Jesus and other writers whose points of view appear in the NT. This chapter argues that if black theologians and ethicists accept as true four claims about ancient Israelite society, they can appreciate the idiosyncrasies of the ideologies, tropes, moral points of view, and understandings of Divinity in the HB. They can also understand better the theological and moral philosophies of Jesus and of NT writers. These four claims are: l

l

l

l

competing socioeconomic and political groups comprised ancient Israel and Judah; rival socioeconomic and political groups in ancient Israel and Judah produced competing beliefs about the Divine; antagonistic socioeconomic and political groups in ancient Israel and Judah held clashing views about issues and circumstances in Israelite and Judean society; and adversarial socioeconomic and political groups in ancient Israel and Judah used various instruments and institutions to promote and defend their sociopolitical and economic proclivities, of which the spread of ideology through literature was chief.2

Fashioning an angle of vision on the HB that helps African American theologians and moral philosophizers appreciate better the teachings and ethics of Jesus, Paul, and other NT writers is not an entirely new undertaking. This issue has its roots in two significant interrelated phenomena. One event was the attempt of the Jesus movement to understand the sacred texts of Judaism. After the execution of Jesus and the ascendancy of belief in his Messiahship, his Jewish followers frequently wrestled with questions about the Law and the Prophets or the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms, and about how to interpret and appropriate their contents. Central to this is that many of the devotees in the Jesus movement were Jewish and that texts which appear in the HB were foundations in which different forms of Judaism in Palestine rooted their notions about the Holy, the sociopolitical ordering of society, the “Other,” and the moral life. While the Mishnah casts light on strategies for interpreting and appropriating data in the HB used by rabbis during the first century ce, no specific, unified answer is present

The Hebrew Bible and Black Theology

105

on the precise role texts that ultimately appear in the HB played in constructing notions about the Holy and delineating the good life, or on the processes or methods employed by Jesus’s followers to formulate theology or to gain guidance for moral decisionmaking during the first few decades after the crucifixion of Jesus.3 An effort to sculpt a hermeneutic that positions African American theologians and moral philosophers to understand better or appropriate responsibly the teachings of Jesus and other writers that appear in the NT also emerges from Africentric biblical criticism. In the present chapter, the adjective “Africentric” denotes a point of view arising from the predicament of persons of color in the African diaspora. What this approach does is to use the notions of socioeconomic oppression and other forms of marginality as backdrops against which to sculpt paradigms for articulating possible meanings of texts in the Bible. In the context of hermeneutics, the term is about an approach to interpreting the HB that is a part of those non-traditional lines of attack on the data in the canon, as well as an alternative approach to reconstructing the social worlds from which these pieces of information in the Bible come. The Africentric strategy for interpreting the Bible in this essay stands on the shoulders of historical and literary-critical forms of Africentric biblical interpretation.4 The present analysis, then, uses the phrase “Africentric biblical hermeneutic” to describe a critical angle of vision on the Bible and on the biblical communities that emerges mainly from the circumstances of persons of African descent in the United States and elsewhere in the African diaspora. It, however, is critical to note that the idea of reading the Bible from a point of view that is analogous to an interpretive position espoused by blacks is not a recent arrival to the intellectual scene. Saillant explores the origins of black biblical hermeneutics, and he makes a compelling case for recognizing that this type of reading strategy goes back to the eighteenth century. He argues that African Americans often grounded their ways of viewing the Bible in a principle or in a set of principles that differed from strategies Euro-Americans employed to interpret the Bible.5 This chapter proposes that African American theologians and moral philosophers adopt an Africentric biblical hermeneutic that builds upon critical theorizing about the nature of the HB. There are apparent similarities between critical theorizing about the literature in the HB and angles of vision on the HB in the black experience. Critical theorizing about the nature of the HB remains a hot topic of conversation amongst students at Liberal Arts programs in Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Historical Black Theological Schools (HBTS). As mentioned above, a hermeneutic for reading the HB, acknowledging the theological and moral heterogeneity and ideological conditioning of the traditions in the HB, can enhance the ability of African American theologians and social ethicists to understand the teachings of Jesus and other writers whose points of view appear in the NT.

Significant features of the Hebrew Bible Theological heterogeneity Studies of religion and theology in the biblical communities argue that theistic conceptions of the Divine were commonplace in ancient Israelite society.6 A theistic

106

Handbook of African American Theology

conception of the Divine understands or believes that the Divine is a god (or a group of gods) behaving similarly to a person (or group of persons). A close analysis of the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings) and the pre-exilic literary prophets confirms that subgroups in the biblical community viewed or understood the Divine as either a god or as a group of gods. Israel, therefore, was monolatrous or henotheistic before the Babylonian catastrophe of 587 bce. This type of religiousness affirms that there are multiple gods or goddesses but that one should worship just one of those gods. Piety amongst monarchs and “rank and file” Israelites or Judeans before 587 included rituals, cultic functionaries, and other religious activities and beliefs that permitted the worship of gods and goddesses which included but were not limited to cults devoted to Yahweh, El, Baal, Anat, Ishtar, and Asherah.7 The HB indicates there was some push-back and that there was a minority in the biblical community who rejected henotheism and promoted the worship of one deity, YHWH. The YHWH alone cult worked with two major philosophical assumptions about the Divine: (a) that one god should be worshipped; and (b) that the name of this god is YHWH. The worship of YHWH alone was the program of Moses and the Deuteronomic school, a subgroup in the biblical community, which came to prominence in ancient Israel during the seventh century bce and became the dominant form of religiosity in the biblical community after the Exile.8 Understandings about how divinity interacted with Israel was another point of contention about the divine in the biblical community. Depictions of the deity in the first two chapters in Genesis support this claim. Genesis 1:1–2:4a, on the one hand, describes a deity who is distant and without intimate contact with creation. This deity speaks, and things happen. The deity commands and whatever the deity orders comes into existence. Genesis 2:4b-25, on the other hand, depicts a deity who is very “up close and very personal.” The deity shapes animals and humans from the hard dirt on the ground. The deity breathes life into the male human being. The deity is concerned about the loneliness of the male human being; consequently, the deity even creates a female human being to be the companion for the male human being. Different beliefs about the will of YHWH in regards to the same issue are in the HB. The case of the inviolability of Jerusalem warrants this conclusion. Isaiah of Jerusalem and Micah both preached in the Southern Kingdom during the eighth century bce. While Isaiah 33:20–22 suggests YHWH will ensure that Jerusalem will stand, Micah 3:9–12 indicates YHWH will ensure that Jerusalem will fall. Malachi 3:6 and Numbers 23:19 say that God’s mind does not change. One, however, cannot help but introduce Genesis 6:6 and 1 Samuel 15:11 into this conversation. Genesis 6:6 says the opinion the deity has about humankind was not the same belief the deity once held about humanity, and 1 Samuel 15:11 says the deity’s view about whether Saul should be king was not the opinion the deity held when the deity selected Saul to be king. Accepting as true the claim that theological heterogeneity is a salient feature of the HB should be a feature of any hermeneutic that seeks to understand the HB, for recognizing this fact improves the ability of African American theologians and moral philosophers to appreciate the beliefs and tropes in the HB and the ideology and ethics of Jesus and other writers in the NT.

The Hebrew Bible and Black Theology

107

Moral heterogeneity Moral heterogeneity is a feature of the HB. This chapter uses the term “morality” to designate those beliefs, guidelines, customs, or manners in the HB that demonstrate or cast light on how agents behave or act towards themselves, members in their community, or members outside of their community. While the HB provides the critic with a glimpse of the moral landscape in ancient Israel, absent from its contents is literature that launches a detailed investigation into the fact that alternative views about the good and the right may be plausible or even reasonably held. That is to say, the HB gives scant analytic attention, in the Western sense of moral theorization, to those philosophical issues that might define a well-thought-out system for moral decisionmaking. Discussion, too, is absent about whether disagreement about what is believed to be praiseworthy human behavior is because of difference in the moral ideals that comprise the catalog of principles that agents may hold, or because people may have the same assortment of principles, but espouse a different ranking amongst those moral ideals that comprise their inventory of values. Perhaps epistemological heterogeneity in regard to knowing the good and the right undergird the different beliefs about morality that appear in the HB. Three cases come to mind. l

l

l

Deuteronomy 12–26 contends that an act is good or right if and only if it is in obedience to the laws and commands of YHWH. This type of moral theorization finds articulation in the “Obedience brings blessings/disobedience brings disaster” trademark of Deuteronomic theology and historiography. The Deuteronomic school implanted this view in its narratives, when it drafted them or when it selected those extant separate traditions it was collecting and arranging into the books that comprise Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings. Proverbs, on the other hand, and the other books traditionally called Wisdom books, display a humanistic moral epistemology: an act is good, right, or prudent if and only if it is in accordance with the preponderance of what experience teaches. In the classical prophets, an act or deed is good, right, or just, if and only if it is in accordance with justice or with a specific moral ideal proclaimed by the prophet.

The HB is replete with heterogeneity in regard to common moral issues. Four items come to mind: 1) homicide; 2) intermarriage with Canaanites; 3) distribution of the tithes; and 4) edible animals. While Leviticus 24:17 says to kill any man who kills another man, Exodus 32:27 says that the deity commanded Levites to slaughter other members of the biblical community. Deuteronomy 7:3–5 forbids marriage with Canaanites but Deuteronomy 20:14 permits marriage with Canaanites. Deuteronomy 14:26 indicates that the tithes should be consumed or enjoyed by the one who presents them to the deity. Numbers 18:26, however, says that the tithes should be given to the Levites. Genesis 9:3 says that members of the biblical community can eat any animal they want to eat. Leviticus 11:2 and Deuteronomy 14:3 categorize animals and specify which creatures the biblical community can consume.9 While the principles, norms, and moral codes in the HB address behavior in both the individual and public domain,

108

Handbook of African American Theology

ancient Israelite or Judean societies were the worlds or places to live out these moral ideals. These laws, commands, and principles are not concerned with the values or with controlling the moral impulses of agents who are not members of ancient Israelite or Judean societies.

Ideological conditioning Bias is present in the themes, tropes, theologies, and points of view in the HB. Consider the following two claims: (a) socio-religio-economic and politically powerful and elite individuals or groups in Israelite and Judean society codified the themes, tropes, moral principles, and beliefs about the Divine in the HB; and (b) the themes, tropes, theologies, and ethical positions in the HB reflect the ethos and agenda of socio-religio-economic and politically powerful and elite individuals or groups in Israelite and Judean society. It is unrealistic to conclude that all the persons who comprised the biblical community possessed the same frameworks for viewing and articulating their understandings of circumstances and the Divine; therefore, it is probable that ideological conflict was present, and that this clash of beliefs was a “midwife” for infighting and irreconcilable disputes amongst individuals in the biblical communities. Frank S. Frick says: Most of the histories of ancient Israel, especially in their treatment of the period preceding the formation of the monarchy, have been written basically from a perspective which views history-as-biography explanatory framework. In this framework, history is by and large conceived of as the story of the actions of discrete persons or groups. Furthermore these persons or groups are, for the most part, those at the upper end of the social spectrum, since as has often been observed, peasants seldom make written history, or more accurately, seldom make it into the history books as written by the upper stratum of society.10

Frick’s comments about the “authors” or formulators of written histories in ancient communities invite us to consider the identity and programs of the authors of the Deuteronomistic history and other texts that came down to us from ancient Israel and Judah. If a small segment of the population in the biblical communities could write with the level of sophistication to produce complex texts and, if this subgroup was probably a segment of those socio-religio-economic and political elites who comprised the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, then socio-religio-economic and political elites in ancient Israelite and Judah probably produced those texts that appear in the HB. Working with the assumption that human self-interest, distinct socioeconomic subgroups, and competition for limited resources were permanent features of the socioeconomic landscape in ancient Israel and Judah, and that written texts in ancient Israelite society came from the hands of the affluent, one should suspect that elites in ancient Israel and Judah produced texts that inculcated beliefs and values in the masses that promoted and protected the interests of those who formulated the texts. What is more, one group of political elites (say, priests) could use writing and the production of written texts to limit or constrain the power of another rival affluent or power group

The Hebrew Bible and Black Theology

109

(say, priests) in ancient Israelite or Judean society. Critical social theorization, then, requires that we examine and anticipate how tropes, themes, moral ideals, and understandings about Divinity in the HB worked to the advantage of segments of the population in the biblical communities. Royal ideology is an example of a significant political agenda at play in ancient Israel and Judah. It is best to understand this political construct against the backdrop of the emergence of the state in ancient Israel. While the Samuel and Saul stories in 1 Samuel 8–12 cast light on the formation of the Israelite state, Frick (1985) discusses models from the social sciences that can abet in our understanding of the sociopolitical process that could account for the biblical community transitioning from an acephalous entity comprised of several self-governed, politically equal heterogeneous social subgroups to a sociopolitical collectivity under the authority of a single leadership figure and a tiered governance structure.11 Rival positions appear in the Deuteronomistic history about upon whom the mantle rests for leadership over all the tribal groups that comprised ancient Israel. 2 Samuel 7:8-17 indicates that YHWH established an agreement with David. Through the prophet Nathan, YHWH sends word that David and his offspring would rule the entire biblical community for ever. 1 Kings 11:29-38, however, suggests the deity entered an agreement with Jeroboam I. Through the prophet Ahijah, YHWH sends word that Jeroboam I and his descendants would rule over ten tribes and that the house of David would rule just one tribe. The implications of these ideologies about governance and leadership in ancient Israel and Judah are significant, for they undermine any notions about self-governance or about the efficacy of other types of institutions for providing leadership and authority over individuals. According to royal ideology, YHWH chose monarchy, and the pedigree of a male qualified him for kingship. Royal ideology too leaves the door ajar for one family to rule an entire nation because of the assumption or belief that the Divine ordained its rule. This ideological backing for a monarch can convince many neither to challenge his legitimacy nor to question his policies; consequently, linking one’s reign to Divine ordination allows a ruler to stay in power while executing oppressive actions. Texts that promote and protect the interests of the privileged and the powerful appear throughout the HB.

Summary The HB is a tapestry of rival conceptions about the Divine, clashing opinions about issues in the moral life, and texts that support socioeconomic, religious, and political agendas in ancient Israel and Judah. Appreciating the rich texture of the HB is of extreme importance for African American theologians and social ethicists because these individuals include and build upon the ideas in this body of literature in the formulation of their arguments about topics in liberation theology and ethics, i.e., liberation, oppression, exploitation, violence, justice, poverty, power, marginalized groups, and privilege. In what follows, the issue of poverty is used to demonstrate religious and moral heterogeneity in the HB.12 The chapter ends with a brief treatment on the benefits of recognizing that heterogeneity and ideological conditioning are features of the HB and how acknowledging this feature of the HB enhances the ability

110

Handbook of African American Theology

of African American theologians and social ethicists to understand the teachings of Jesus and other writers whose points of view appear in the NT.

Poverties in the Hebrew Bible Poverty receives considerable attention in the HB. This concept appears in various literary strata, in different literary genres. While this term often denotes inadequate material resources to meet one’s basic needs, i.e., food, clothes, and shelter, the texts where this concept is present offer rival theories about the cause of this circumstance in the life of the agent.

Poverty as theological punishment If you will neither listen to the voice of YHWH your God nor obey the commandments or statues of YHWH that I today command you, then these curses will engulf you: 16 You will be cursed in urban and rural areas. 17 Your basket and your bowl in which you mix the ingredients for your bread will be cursed. Deut. 28:15-17 15

The words above appear in one of the speeches placed on the lips of Moses. This oration is part of a longer sermon that links prosperity and success to obeying the commands of YHWH, and that connects material deprivation to waywardness, rebellion, or noncompliance with the rules YHWH set for each member of the community to follow. Verse 17 is of particular interests because it suggests that a correlation exists between defiance and the lack of edible items to fill one’s basket and the ability to produce bread. Two interpretations are possible: (a) the items that procure the resources, i.e., your basket and your bowl, will be defective; or (b) the items in your basket and container, the edibles, will be insufficient. It is important to mention that the verse uses the term “curse” (’а¯rûr) in its past participal form as an adjective to describe the basket and bowl of the person who refuses to comply with YHWH. The usage of ’а¯rûr in this passage suggests that evil, harm, or inefficaciousness are in the very composition of the basket and bowl of the disobedient person. The message is clear: inadequate physical resources to meet a basic need are a sure consequence of disobeying YHWH, and if poverty is insufficient material resources to meet one’s basic needs, then this verse supports the claim that the cause of poverty is the rebellion against YHWH.13

Poverty as a self-inflicted wound Hey lazy person: how long will you lie in bed? When will you arise from your sleep?

9

A little sleep and a little slumber, A little folding of the hands for sleep,

10

The Hebrew Bible and Black Theology

111

Your poverty shall come on you like a robber, Your poverty shall come on you like an armed man. 11

Prov. 6:9-11 The one who works with a slack hand will be poor; The one who works with a disciplined hand, however, will get rich. Prov. 10:4

Proverbs is a collection of witty sayings about a plethora of issues. These different sayings emerge from the Wisdom tradition in ancient Israel. Wisdom literature in the HB embraces a very different epistemological strategy for knowing the will of the deity and for identifying those actions which are praiseworthy. The Wisdom literature contends that experience teaches the agent much about life and that the prudent person pays attention to the advice of wise persons. In this aspect, the worldview in the Wisdom literature is different from the worldview in the literature that comes from the hand of the Deuteronomic school and the Prophets. While Proverbs 6:9-11 and 10:4 are present in different literary units, several common themes run through these maxims: l l l

humans are responsible for their actions; human activities have consequences; and poor human actions lead to poverty and destitution.

Proverbs 6:9-11 argues that a person is without resources to meet his/her basic needs because he/she is lazy (‘а-s.ël). Proverbs 10:4 says that a person is destitute because he or she does not work hard. These maxims utilize different terminology to link poverty to lethargy; consequently, these texts advance the claim that neediness is a consequence of poor choices. In these maxims, poverty is a circumstance the agent brings on him/ herself. Moral decision-making, i.e., bad conduct, not YHWH, is the reason dearth characterizes one’s circumstance.14

Poverty as an institutional problem Power, privilege, oppression, liberation, marginalized groups, and poverty are issues that receive treatment in the eighth-century prophets. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah of Jerusalem, and Micah worked in the eighth century bce. Amos and Hosea worked in the North, and Isaiah and Micah worked in the South. Houston (2006) provides an extensive analysis of oppression in the HB; it too casts light on oppression in Amos, Hosea, Isaiah of Jerusalem, and Micah.15 For example, this passage in Amos shows another understanding of poverty in the HB: Thus says YHWH: For three sins of Israel, and because of four sins, I will not change my mind. Because they sell the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals.

6

7

They are trampling the heads of the poor into the dirt on the ground;

112

Handbook of African American Theology

They turn aside the way of the afflicted; A man and his father have sex with the same young girl; therefore, they desecrate my Holy Name. They lay down on garments they took in pledge near every altar; They drink wine in the house of their gods paid for by the money they obtained through fines.16 Amos 2:6-8

8

Amos indicates poverty was a consequence of the broader socioeconomic system in Israel. It had nothing to do with an individual disobeying the commandments of YHWH nor with his immoral conduct. The verses indicate Amos’s fascination with social ethics. That is to say, the interplay between social structures and processes and the plight of marginalized groups frequently is the focus of the prophecies in the book of Amos; consequently, one has to approach the materials in Amos accepting as true the claim that institutions contribute to the oppression or perennial disadvantaging of minority social subgroups in Israelite societies. The passage proffers that reflection on the moral life should be pragmatic. This enterprise should explore the effects of socioeconomic practices in the everyday, ordinary affairs of people in the biblical community. Amos, therefore, identified privileged groups and the methods they utilized to relegate the poor to positions of socioeconomic inferiority. Amos challenges these institutional sources of abuse by exposing the perpetrators and the exposing offenses which they executed on marginalized groups. This discussion on poverty reveals that at least three understandings of this concept are present in the HB. This issue, however, will not hamstring our efforts to construct an interpretive framework for reading or interpreting the HB in a manner that helps us understand better the teachings and ethics of Jesus and other writers whose theological ideas and moral points of view appear in the NT.

Conclusion The rival notions about the divine, the competing beliefs about morality, and the ideology in the HB force us to situate the points of view and agendas in the HB and move towards locating Jesus and other writers whose points of view appear in the NT in these traditions that were present in ancient Israel. The social location of passages in the HB refers to the fact that there exists a nexus between an idea, a principle, or a theological belief that appears in texts in the HB to particular ideas, principles, or religious beliefs in specific ethical or theological camps in ancient Israel. Finding these passages in the NT, then, shows there is a nexus between an idea, a principle, or a theological belief that appears in texts in the NT to particular ideas, principles, or theological beliefs in specific ethical or theological camps in the HB. Luke 4:18 reports that Jesus believed he was sent to preach the good news to the poor. What the African American theologian and social ethicist must do is locate Jesus

The Hebrew Bible and Black Theology

113

in a stream of conversation about the poor and poverty in the HB. The ramifications are far-reaching: if Jesus aligns himself with the camp that claims the cause of poverty is a rebellion against YHWH, then the good news Jesus must preach is repentance and renewing the relationship with God, and the questions about social justice moves to a place of lesser importance. If Jesus aligns himself with the idea the cause of poverty is laziness, then the good news he must preach should in some way assign blame for poverty to the one who is impoverished, with the goal of convincing the impoverished that diligence is the key to improving his or her circumstances. If Jesus accepts that the cause of poverty is institutional, then he needs to preach social justice, economic empowerment, political education and activism, and other ways to reform and undo oppressive systems. It is important to note that Jesus was a moral agent: he appeared at a point and grew up in a specific milieu. He attached himself to particular ideas, principles, or theological beliefs in distinct ethical or theological camps in the HB; hence, our model pushes us to be very intentional about identifying to which idea, moral point of view, or agenda in the HB Jesus attaches himself. Stated differently, African American theologians and social ethicists must recognize that Jesus selects which ideas in the HB warrant his allegiance; and the antitheses in Matthew 5 support this claim.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

As was said above, 1 Kgs 18; 2 Kgs 23; Ezra 7, and the consensus of critical scholarship on the HB contend that subsections of the HB appeared at different moments in the history of the biblical community: portions came together during the politico-religious activities of Hezekiah in the eighth century, Josiah in the seventh century, and Ezra in the fifth century, with the final assemblage of the HB occurring in Jamnia in 90 ce. On this point, see Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Mira Morgenstern, ed., Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017). While allegorical and literal approaches became major strategies for unlocking the meaning of the “Old Testament” amongst Christians, four interrelated methods emerged for interpreting the HB and for discussing its relationship to the teachings of Jesus and other writers in the New Testament in Christendom. These approaches were the historical, allegorical, tropological (moral/ethical), and anagogical (eschatological). For a concise discussion on these angles of vision on the HB, see William Klein et al., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1993), 42–5. It is important to note that the first major volume that delineated various camps and basic ideas in Africentric biblical criticism was Cain H. Felder, ed., Stony the Road We Trod (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988). John Saillant, “Origins of African-American Biblical Hermeneutics in EighteenthCentury Black Opposition to the Slave Trade and Slavery,” in African-Americans and the Bible: Social Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Continuum, 2001), 236–50. A legion of literature is present on religions and theologies in ancient Israel. Two publications that are particularly helpful for gaining familiarity with the religious landscape in ancient Israel are Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, Vol. 1

114

7

8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16

Handbook of African American Theology (Louisville: WJK Press, 1995), and Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Theologies in the Old Testament, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002). While there are several texts in 1–2 Kings that condemn Israelite and Judean kings for worshiping divinities other than YHWH, texts are present in the HB that provide a glimpse of popular religion in the biblical communities. Jer. 7:16-19 is a window on folk religion in Judah. It states that cults dedicated to the Queen of Heaven (limleket hāššmayim) and to other gods (lē’lōhim ăhērim) were present in Judah. Leslie Allen contends that the Queen of Heaven mentioned in Jer. 7:16-19 is Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of fertility. Leslie Allen, Jeremiah (Louisville: WJK Press, 2008), 98. On the Queen of Heaven cult, see also Susan Ackerman, “ ‘And the Women Knead Dough’: The Worship of the Queen of Heaven in Sixth-Century Judah,” in Women in the Hebrew Bible, ed. Alice Bach (New York: Routledge, 1999), 21–32. The use of the term other gods in this passage supports the claim that cults for divinities other than YHWH were commonplace in Judah. See Harold V. Bennett, Injustice Made Legal: Deuteronomic Law and the Plight of Widows, Strangers, and Orphans in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 153–62; and Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, 111–17. Cyril S. Rodd’s book Glimpses of A Strange Land (London: T&T Clark, 2001) offers extended treatment on a host of moral subjects that appear in the HB, and R. Norman Whybray’s book The Good Life in the Old Testament (London: T&T Clark, 2002) performs an analysis of moral subjects that appear in each book in the Old Testament. The critic can use both publications to identify other issues for which there is a difference of opinion in the HB. Frank S. Frick, The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985), 13. Ibid. The translations from the HB are mine. The beliefs there is a nexus between disobedience and material deprivation, and there is a correlation between obedience and prosperity, are significant features of the worldview in Deuteronomy; these ideas too are premises of the historiography in Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Deuteronomy 27:14-26 is more evidence that the theology in Deuteronomy supports the understanding that disobedience evokes material suffering. For more on this point, see Rob Barrett, Disloyalty and Destruction: Religion and Politics in Deuteronomy and the Modern World (New York: T&T Clark, 2009). Proverbs 13:18 too links poverty to the lack of self-discipline. More conversation about the relationship between bad behavior and poverty in Proverbs is in Roland E. Murphy, Proverbs, WBC (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 73. Walter J. Houston, Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament (New York: T&T Clark, 2006). The Hebrew literally reads: the wine of those who were fined (yeyin ‘ănûšîm).

Bibliography Ackerman, Susan. “And the Women Knead Dough”: The Worship of the Queen of Heaven in Sixth-Century Judah.” In Women in the Hebrew Bible, edited by Alice Bach, 21–32 (New York: Routledge, 1999). Allen, Leslie. Jeremiah (Louisville: WJK, 2008).

The Hebrew Bible and Black Theology

115

Barrett, Rob. Disloyalty and Destruction: Religion and Politics in Deuteronomy and the Modern World (New York: T&T Clark, 2009). Bennett, Harold V. Injustice Made Legal (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). Felder, Cain H., ed. Stony the Road We Trod (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991). Frick, Frank S. The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985). Gerstenberger, Erhard S. Theologies in the Old Testament. Translated by John Bowden. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002). Houston, Walter J. Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament (New York: T&T Clark, 2006). Kaltner, John. Ishmael Instructs Isaac (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1999). Klein, William, et al. Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993). Morgenstern, Mira, ed., Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017). Murphy, Roland E. Proverbs. WBC. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998). Myers, William H. “The Hermeneutical Dilemma of the African-American Biblical Student.” In Stony the Road We Trod, edited by Cain H. Felder, 40–56 (Minneapolis; Fortress Press, 1991). Preuss, Horst Dietrich. Old Testament Theology. Vol. 1 (Louisville: WJK Press, 1995). Rodd, Cyril S. Glimpses of A Strange Land (London: T&T Clark, 2001). Saillant, John. “Origins of African-American Biblical Hermeneutics in Eighteenth-Century Black Opposition to the Slave Trade and Slavery.” In African-Americans and The Bible: Social Texts and Social Textures, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush, 236–50 (New York: Continuum, 2001). Spinoza, Baruch. Theological-Political Treatise. Translated by Jonathan Israel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory: A User Friendly Guide. 3rd edn. (New York: Routledge, 2004). Whybray, R. Norman. The Good Life in the Old Testament (London: T&T Clark, 2002).

9

From Ideology to Theology: Toward a More Liberating Doctrine of Revelation Harry H. Singleton

Introduction A substantive doctrine of revelation demands its reimaging on the heels of centuries of oppressive Christian theology. In particular, most treatments of revelation have either made racial caste synonymous with divine will or have sought a substantive treatment of Christian faith that divorces revelation from racial caste.1 Further, with lingering misogyny in society and church and an eschewing of the acute poverty globally in the age of prosperity, ministries have all but robbed Christian theology of its legitimacy and the church of its credibility for millennials and the abolitionist tradition. The Christian theological tradition has produced scores of thinkers who have weighed in on revelation. Yet, the glaring weakness of those treatments is that they have not, for the most part, addressed the struggles of the two-thirds world, or more particularly, the oppressive history of America as the pinnacle of theological contradiction. On the one hand, white colonists took a liberating conscience into its “revolution” with Britain to remove itself from the tentacles of tyranny but, on the other hand, continued to deny freedom to the slaves who aided and abetted them in obtaining that freedom. This contradiction was given ultimate validation by a theology of black subjugation that emerged in white churches making God and Jesus the inaugurators of white privilege. In so doing, it invoked the blessings of divinity on the white way of life. More particularly, Jesus’s whiteness became the basis by which humanity is valued with a white life still more precious than a black life even today! Thus, the racial struggle became not just a historical struggle but a theological struggle as well. It is the struggle not only for the destiny of humanity but also for what God has said about that destiny. Even the quintessential theologian of the twentieth century for many, Karl Barth, failed to recognize the significance of oppressive relationships in the Bible with his treatment of revelation. While he was insistent that the kingdom could not be realized by humans and that God’s irruption into history in Jesus was the standard for determining God’s will for the kingdom, he did not carry that methodology into oppressive human contexts. Making sure that he established the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and humans was more significant to him than racial segregation and apartheid.2

118

Handbook of African American Theology

This has to do, in large part, with the fact that he and other white male theologians wrote squarely within the pale of the very bigotry that privileged them. Black invisibility had become just as integral a part of Christian theology as white visibility. (In fact, a Christian theology of white supremacy mandated both!) A racist status quo had become the norm in global life and the cry for freedom from those on the “underside of history” became demonic and worthy of white contempt. Yet a treatment of revelation that does not depart from those peripheral voices ceases to be Christian theology inasmuch as it distorts the Christ event by making Jesus an agent of human oppression rather than an agent of human liberation. Further, treatments of revelation that ignore humanity’s inhumanity to humanity detach Christian faith from its socially redemptive meaning as exemplified in the life of Jesus on behalf of the disinherited. This means that revelation, if it is to have any meaning for our time, must be reimaged in such a way that it no longer sanctions the demonization of black bodies. That reimaging must occur in three areas: the scope of revelation; the life of Jesus; and the coming kingdom.

Reimaging the scope of revelation Reimaging the scope of revelation to bring it out of its ideological function as a front for human oppression is crucial for transforming ideology to theology. That must begin with expanding the scope of revelation beyond its preoccupation with personal wish fulfillment. That is to say, the scope of Christian theology has been centered on reforming the religious individual out of her sinful desires, lust and avarice, and into an unbridled commitment to family, nation, and God. On the surface, this seems to be fitting and proper as it has constituted the crux of our religious socialization for the past two millennia. We make the case in religious pedagogy that these moral precepts originate from God and are communicated to us (revelation). Yet the ideological function of Christian theology lies in what is not a part of those precepts. What has not figured prominently in Christian theology is humanity’s inhumanity to humanity in the collective realm of human existence. As sexism existed at the origin of the church, as “Christian” nations have conveniently not made the denunciation of racism an essential part of Christian theology, and as poverty became a dirty word as the church’s membership became more middle and upper class, academe and the church became institutions that sanctioned human oppression.3 Methodologically, the primary treatment of Christian theology has been to divorce it from “controversial” issues like race, gender, and class. This has kept Christian language mired in what I term a first-order realm, i.e., issues of the religious individual and personal wish fulfillment, and not in the more challenging second-order realm of human oppression. The danger of an exclusive first-order methodology has been what we have witnessed—the restricting of Christian language to individual issues and the moving of collective issues to the periphery of Christian life. This has meant God’s revelation being practically void of content that speaks to human oppression (except to justify it!). As a result, a Christian orthodoxy has emerged that hardens Christian hearts and minds to God’s revelation as one of human liberation.

A Doctrine of Revelation

119

In this sense, Christian theology unashamedly maintains its ideological function. For not only does this exclusive first-order approach conveniently ignore biblical revelation’s call for freedom from social injustice but it also ignores the inescapably contextual nature of the theological task itself.4 In addition to misappropriating biblical revelation to justify the legitimacy of oppressive contexts, first-order theology also reveals God and Jesus to be inaugurators of those contexts. Thus, the condemnation of white supremacy, the substantive inclusion of women in society and the church, and the incessant attack on poverty occupy a peripheral status at best in the academy and church in lieu of the “weightier issues” of the religious individual. It is at this point that the ideological circle of Christian theology is completed. It serves the function of ultimate significance, precisely because it originates from God, while not styling that function as one that seeks an end to the structural conditions that perpetuate human oppression. Given the enormous societal benefits derived by whites, men, and the wealthy from the continual invisibility of a liberation motif in Christian theology, and the prominent visibility of homophobia, Christian superiority, church growth, and personal wish fulfillment, Christian theology, both wittingly and unwittingly, has become the most potent ideological weapon in sanctioning human oppression. It has done so wittingly by honoring white power brokers’ demand for a Christian theology of personal emphasis that ignores the racial, gender, and class hegemony from which those power brokers benefit. It has done so unwittingly through the creation of “devout” Christians in both academy and church that sincerely think they are serving both institutions best by protecting them from change by so-called liberals, progressives, and activist rabble-rousers! In fact, ultimate meaning for such Christians comes in defense of Christian orthodoxy, i.e., in defense of the existing situation. Christians, we are told, are often easy to locate. They are the people marooned on the wrong side of history. Again and again, century after dispiriting century, they have dug in their heels against progress. In politics . . . a Christian’s instinctive allegiance has been with despots and oppressors rather than democrats and liberators, with inquisitors and book burners as opposed to probing minds and pamphleteers. Christians have buttressed hierarchy against equality, patriarchy against women’s rights, absolutism against individualism, and small-minded tradition against broadminded tolerance.5

While Carroll and Shiflett maintain that there is some hyperbole in the above assessment, the larger critique of a Christian orthodoxy that divorces itself from a prophetic condemnation of structural injustice does deserve a prominent place in the future of Christian theological discourse. As the language of socio-political liberation has continually fallen out of the purview of “proper” Christian pedagogy over several generations it has predictably created apologists that defend Christian faith’s antiliberationist bent. As such, the scope of Christian theology has become imprisoned in a first-order realm of static individualism and is seldom expanded to a second-order realm of human liberation. This has been particularly the case in America where the defense of Christian orthodoxy has been at the same time the defense of an antiliberationist faith that has served the interests of white privilege well. Yet to forward a

120

Handbook of African American Theology

Christian theology of white superiority as normative is to align God’s will with human oppression and makes a mockery of the life of Jesus.

Reimaging the life of Jesus A substantive treatment of revelation must also reimage the life of Jesus. Historically, white Christian leadership has found it more palatable to focus on Jesus’s body rather than his ministry. By focusing on the body of Jesus, substantive theological discourse becomes rooted in whether Jesus understood himself to be divine, whether he was the Son of God, or whether he thought the Parousia was imminent. By departing from Jesus’s being, the focus has centered on his messiahship and whether even he understood it to be strictly an event for all humanity or whether he was establishing a paradigm for future engagement with forces inimical to God’s reign after he had physically left the scene. To be sure the intent by white Christian leadership was to establish a paradigm around the life of Jesus that never connected him to transformative social action. In other words, the paradigm for both academy and church has been to affirm Jesus as someone who either condoned racial hegemony or who had little concern for it. However, departing from the ministry of Jesus has posed a serious challenge to the premise that God’s ultimate concern for humanity has little earthly redemptive value. It is in the ministry of Jesus where we find a man deeply concerned with humanity’s inhumanity to humanity. Whether it was a natural affliction such as blindness,6 challenging the religious authorities on the contextual significance of the Sabbath,7 choosing a person from a despised people (and not a religious leader) to reimage what it means to be a neighbor,8 or reimaging God not just as a healer but as a liberator,9 the life of Jesus speaks to God’s redemptive demand to ameliorate the conditions of the disinherited. Further, Jesus’s making the redemptive concern available for all humans opens God’s liberating reign to members of the dominant community as well. This liberating reign does not call for passive acceptance of human oppression but calls for struggle against all powers that prevent a full human liberation from realization. In fact, methodologically, Latin American liberation theologians depart from Jesus’s life confirming a “preferential option for the poor.”10 Thus, Jesus’s life represents huge problems for power brokers who benefit economically from the current situation of racist, gender, and class hegemony. This is why the ministry of Jesus is relegated to the fringes of Christian theological discourse and, when it is included in the theological perspective of white theologians, it does not lend itself to a liberating method but rather remains mired in language unrelated to the black condition. On the one hand, much of the criticism for the primary emphasis on the religious individual’s relationship with God is directed to Protestantism’s origins and the need to affirm a “priesthood of all believers.” Yet, even Catholicism’s insistence that no legitimate relationship with God could exist for the laity void of clergy still placed no emphasis on the liberation motif inherent in Jesus’s life as a legitimate point of departure for Christian theology. Catholic leadership was more concerned with maintaining the centrality of the church in Christian life than it was with a church that had come to take on an anti-liberationist bent, particularly as it relates to the freedom of black people.

A Doctrine of Revelation

121

This was not by happenstance. In order to effectively forward the legitimacy of a Christian theology of black subordination, the central figure of the faith had to be aligned with the goals of that subordination. Otherwise, Christian theology would be useless or, worse yet, an opponent of racial privilege. By effectively eliminating the life of Jesus from mainstream Christian discourse, Jesus was imaged as a proponent of white privilege. As such, God could only reasonably communicate to the Christian world those precepts that buttress that privilege. In addition, to emphasize the uniqueness of Jesus’ metaphysical nature as that which allows him to be Christ, makes what it means to be Christ inaccessible to ordinary Christians. There becomes little reason to strive to be an example of Christ in the world, because to be Christ requires a divine incarnation, which happened only in Jesus. By ignoring Jesus Christ’s ministry and focusing on his “being,” he is set apart above humanity. He is seen as someone to be worshipped, believed in, but not followed or imitated.11

Douglas makes clear here that the emphasis on Jesus’s being rather than his ministry has served a profound ideological function in Christian history. That ideological function has found its most effective realization in the presentation of Jesus in white form. Appearing in the American context in the mid-sixteenth century, the proliferation of white images of Jesus provided a most convincing sell to white Christians of their superiority. It has also fashioned an inferior complex in black people leading them to think that their humanity is more affirmed when in the presence of white people (and that white Jesus!). Indeed, it is through the bombardment of white images of Jesus that the white religious establishment was emboldened to make the claim that Jesus’s whiteness confirms biblical revelation’s mandate of black subordination to white people. Thus, biblical revelation and racial imagery began to work in dialectical relationship affirming each other’s legitimacy. A biblical revelation of white privilege and black subordination became reasonable because of Jesus’s whiteness, and Jesus’s whiteness solidified the irrefutable substance of a biblical revelation of white privilege. Thus, what God then would reasonably “reveal” to the human family must dovetail with that dialectical relationship. Theological approaches that start from a liberationist imperative have been immediately branded as iconoclastic, reactionary, and even faddish! Thus, whether willfully or by uncritical defense, revelation has been treated as an affirmation of permanent relationships of human oppression.

Reimaging the coming reign of God If more liberating treatments of revelation are to be constructed, then we must also reimage the coming kingdom. Long styled in oppressive contexts to be consummated at the eschaton, the kingdom of God has primarily been treated in Christian theology as a divine confirmation of the existing situation and a reward for dedicating one’s earthly life to maintaining it. Thus, God comes at the end to reward us for passionately defending social contexts of racial bigotry, sexism, classism, and homophobia and to

122

Handbook of African American Theology

reward its victims for patiently enduring those contexts until the eschaton. The common denominator has been the insistence of Christian orthodoxy to see a sacred nature in the existing situation. This is why movements to change those conditions have been criticized most by Christian leaders and resisted in the name of God. In so far as Christian socialization from the church’s early years has been to affirm the societal status quo, Christian theology’s function has been to provide that status quo with the ultimate moral handmaiden—a theological handmaiden! Whether it has been in the form of sermons, prayers, and songs in the church, or in the proliferation of multi-volume theological works in the academy from towering intellectual figures, Christian faith’s liturgy and erudition have been singularly committed to a theology of human oppression. Take as an example this analysis of the nineteenth-century kingdom from H. Richard Niebuhr: The hope of the kingdom-to-come was subject to many exaggerations and perversions during this period. It was secularized by being detached from its context of faith in the sovereignty and of the experience of grace, while it was attached to the ideas of human sovereignty and natural freedom. It was nationalized, being used to support the feeling of national superiority and manifest destiny. It was confused with the progress of industrialism and capitalism. . . . It was used to justify war and violence as in the days of the English crisis. But even these abnormal forms of hope indicated the power it had over the minds of American Christians. To an ever increasing extent they turned from the expectation of heavenly bliss to the hope of a radical transformation on earth, without abandoning the former as though the two expectations were exclusive of each other.12

To his credit, Niebuhr rightly identifies the theological privileges taken by his colleagues to root the coming kingdom in America in a nationalistic superiority. Yet even in his insight, he still did not make reference to the manipulation of the earth–heaven relationship by white theologians as a basis for instilling in slaves a contentment with their earthly lot, nor did he link manifest destiny to the white racial superiority that was the precursor to national superiority. No references are made to the insurrections, or to the moral condemnation of slavery, the Civil War, and white backlash on the heels of the Hayes–Tilden Compromise—all of which were national issues that had a direct impact on black people’s quest for freedom in the nineteenth century! This lack of attention to the racial situation was lost on Niebuhr as to how even he is privileged by it. This is why the humanity of black people was an afterthought in his and other white theologians’ analysis. He failed to see that he was a beneficiary of the same “exaggerations and perversions,” regarding the coming kingdom that have been a divine pretext for white privilege. In fact, white theology’s most significant selling point in the nineteenth century is that we would be judged on how well we lived the “Manifest Destiny” that God had ordained for both races. It was extremely damaging eschatologically for it maintained that the relationship of master and slave had already been created by God through whites and all that was needed to realize America’s “destiny” was to perpetuate such relationships until the eschaton. Thus, whether it was prohibiting by law gatherings of

A Doctrine of Revelation

123

slaves for fear of insurrection or the plethora of tracts by white Christian leaders promising a “hellish” end for “troublemakers” or the flogging or murder of black leaders engaged in subversive behavior, working for human liberation fell out of the pale of proper Christian conduct—both here and in eternity!13 This means that sin in the coming kingdom came to be judged by how dedicated the Christian is in not eradicating oppressive relationships but in maintaining them until the eschaton. It is in defense of the Christian God that the motivation to stem the tide of public protest against human injustice gets its incomparable demand. This is why attempts to change racial life have been met with so much resistance by Christian institutions. But more important, it is in the theological conclusions inherent in white images of Jesus that the kingdom is structured. It informs both the theological legitimacy of Christian-sponsored racism because of Jesus’s race, and Christian-sponsored sexism because of Jesus’s gender. Both guide the ideological function of Christian theology. Both root God’s eschatological reign in the legitimacy of human oppression by establishing Jesus’s whiteness to confirm the link between divine will and human oppression. In such a theological milieu, moving from ideology to theology has been an arduous task to say the least. In short, situating the kingdom of God in a liberating weltanschauung continues to be an elusive quest.

Beyond ideology What stands before us is the need for a far more expansive treatment of these concepts. Such a treatment is nearing its completion in my recent manuscript.14 What I have tried to demonstrate is that Christian faith should enhance our lives in every sphere, not just the personal sphere. I have also tried to demonstrate that it is the height of theological naiveté to assume that rendering full attention to the religious individual will parlay into a viable solution for the collective struggles of humanity. The commitment for the religious individual must also be equally matched by a sincere commitment to the transformation of oppressive human relationships for the future of Christian faith. To not do so would be to live a truncated Christian existence that serves the power brokers of our time much more than it serves the disinherited. This means reimaging God as a transformer of human relationships and not just a transformer of personal problems. Failure to do so would mean God continuing to perform the ideological function of legitimating human oppression rather than the theological function of eradicating human oppression. But more important, revelation would continue to serve an oppressive function by communicating the language of protecting the world from change as opposed to the language that opens the world, and the Christian mind, to the possibility of hope that comes with the liberation motif. The good news of the new covenant would forever lose its ability to realize itself to those on the “underside of history.” The new covenant would remain the old covenant with its excessive preoccupation with ritual, religious exclusivism, homophobia, and otherworldliness. Indeed, if Christian theology is to shed itself of its ideological “chaff ” it must embrace a God who came to undo what humans have created while not losing sight of the inescapably human dimension in the realization of a kingdom that

124

Handbook of African American Theology

demands human liberation. In this sense, we will transition revelation from ideology to theology and create the possibility for the liberating God to shine forth.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Twentieth Anniversary edn. (New York: Orbis Books, 1990; originally published in 1970). Cone distinguishes between the southern approach to Christian theology that makes racism synonymous with divine will and the northern approach that does not make the liberation motif a part of theological method. For Cone, both are dangerous in their legitimation of black oppression in America. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933; first published in 1918). This work is Barth’s attempt to reestablish the significance of revelation that he felt had been diminished in both the church and the academy. It has served as the standard work of the twentieth century in Christian theology for arguing that the revelation of God in Jesus, and Jesus alone, should guide the Christian theologian’s articulation of faith. Yet even in that point of departure for revelation, Jesus still became co-opted to serve as an affirmer of black oppression, particularly when images of him as white began to proliferate. See Juan Luis Segundo’s classic treatment of Christian theology’s need to be liberated from its own alignment with oppressive power brokers in the church and society in The Liberation of Theology (New York: Orbis Books, 1976). As the title suggests, the history of the church and subsequently the academy reveals a clear alignment with oppressive forces in maintaining racial and gender oppression. His charge is that in order for Christian theology to truly be a theology of liberation it must first shed its oppressive history. In the quest to establish the Bible’s inerrancy as a “fundamental truth,” the contextual nature of biblical revelation has been ignored. That contextual nature is exemplified in the biblical authors, differing issues in their particular books but is most notably exemplified in the differing points of departure with the Synoptic writers, and Paul’s letters to different churches in his public career. See Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperCollins Press, 2005). Taken from Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 1. Jn. 9:13-25. Mk. 2:23-27. Lk. 10:25-37. Lk. 4:18-19. See Jon Sobrino, No Salvation outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays (New York: Orbis Books, 2008). Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (New York: Orbis Books, 1999), 112–13. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1937), 151. See Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of Negroes in the United States (Savannah: Thomas Purse Publishing, 1842). Harry H. Singleton, III, Divine Revelation and Human Liberation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018).

10

The Reality of God and Racism: Shifting Paradigms in Race, Culture, and the Church Henry J. Young

Introduction As we begin to journey through the ups and downs of a new period in history, the postmodern era, I want to begin this discussion with what I think is the most fundamental question of our time. What accounts for the sustainability and persistence of the problem of the color line? This is critical, because it remains at the very core of both institutional and individual racism. Now, as the acclaimed sociologist W.E.B. DuBois pointed out in his classic study, The Souls of Black Folk, the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.1 Although DuBois anticipated its culmination at the end of the century, we continue to experience its pervasiveness in the postmodern era. The problem reached a pivotal point at the end of the century. It did not terminate. The enduring presence means, as John Hope Franklin puts it, we merely pass the color line on from one generation to the next.2 The problem takes different shapes and different forms, always gathering new momentum. The bottom line is the recognition that we are living in a racist society. In other words, racism is characteristic of our daily lifestyle. And its presence is being encountered daily. DuBois echoed his penetrating insights on modernity, but I am convinced he anticipated the continuation of it in postmodernity. To answer the question about its persistence and sustainability, we have to disclose the essential factor that drives it, the reality of God talk. In our culture, we use God talk to sustain exclusivism. For example, members of oppression use the reality of God to sanction and validate their exploitation of the poor and disenfranchised. Victims of this argue that God is on our side. Those on the top use God language to reinforce racist tendencies. Those on the bottom use God language, in a reactionary manner, seeking to overcome it. In each case, the reality of God becomes perceived as an object primarily for utilitarian purposes. This is what the religious philosopher Martin Buber was attempting to overcome in his study, I and Thou.3 Also, the theologian Paul Tillich speaks to it in his idea of “God above God.”4 In both cases, Buber and Tillich are attempting to make relationality and inclusiveness the foundation of God talk. For Buber, God as the Thou is inclusive of the totality of reality. And for Tillich, the reality of God transcends the God of traditional theology where God is merely the highest being alongside other beings. To the contrary,

126

Handbook of African American Theology

as the ground of being, Tillich takes the reality of God beyond the subject/object split. Tillich and Buber realized the subject/object split is geared in the direction of depersonalization, utility, and coerciveness in human relations. Also, it encourages us to make God conform more to the image and likeness of humanity. Fashioning the reality of God into the symbol of whiteness is a clear manifestation of the problem. It is true, as we will seek to show, the reality of God must speak, existentially, to the forever changing circumstances in the world. But relegating the reality of God to skin color, and making God solely the champion of human passions, is not the way to accomplish it. Rather, I am proposing a panentheistic doctrine of God which is inclusive of the totality of experiences in the world, as a viable alternative to the narrow social and spiritual exclusivism of traditional God talk.

Purpose statement It is my contention that the core of our problem in race relations is the symbol of whiteness, as it culminates in individual and institutional racism. God talk, throughout the cultural milieu, is used to sanction and validate it. The traditional notion of God, as the highest being alongside other beings, adheres to the idea of superiority and supremacy. These two phenomena continue to serve as the vanguard of individual and institutional racism. Studies in race relations have too often focused on the victims of racism, i.e. African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and so forth. Such efforts place too much emphasis on making negative evaluations of the victims of the problem, and not enough on the cause of it. My effort is to look carefully at the root of the problem, white racism. There is an urgent need to turn our attention to the implications of whiteness for the sustainability and persistence of racism. I am proposing a deconstruction of it, on the one hand. It centralizes all social ethnicities into a monolithic social paradigm, using skin color as the point of identify formation. Because whiteness represents normativity and centrality in heaven and on earth, we need to see how God talk functions as the locomotive driving both dimensions. It is my contention, because of the increasingly pervasive presence of the symbol whiteness in the cultural milieu, we have created a wall of insulation over against social pluralism. This, as Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized, makes us live in a society that is socially desegregated, but spiritually segregated. For example, the entire acculturation and assimilation process in social institutions, including the Christian church, is focused exclusively in one direction; namely, conformity to whiteness. This is based on superiority and supremacy. Based on the premise of the non-viability of skin color as identity formation for social ethnic groups and God talk, I am calling for a reconstruction of both in the context of a new paradigm.

God, skin color, and symbolism I think the missing link in studies related to race relations is recognizing the twofold dimensions of the color line. Most studies look at its social dimensions. But the color

The Reality of God and Racism

127

line interpenetrates both social and spiritual dimensions, which are two dimensions of a single process. All of them culminate in the symbol whiteness. The social construction of racism focuses on the external, which constitutes the work of sociologists, historians, political scientists, and anthropologists. The spiritual construction of racism is the work of theologians and psychologists; it focuses on the internal. We are succeeding in working effectively with the objective facts of racial discrimination. They are being measured, assessed, and legislated in judicial processes. But the subjective aspects of racial discrimination cannot be measured. Subjectivity is the raw material out of which racial discrimination takes place. It is not until major decisions made subjectively are manifested objectively that we can measure them. They come from the heart. The seeds of racism come from the heart. They come from the spiritual inner self. For this reason, social integration cannot solve problems related to discrimination, until the Christian church deals with this spiritual malfunction. The color of our skin continues to be a major factor in our society. The cultural milieu in Europe and America is constructed on the premise of a chain of being related to skin color. It is hierarchal having whiteness pointing to supremacy and superiority. And God is at the head of the hierarchy. We have configured God into the color paradigm of whiteness. We have placed the symbol of blackness at the bottom. Also, other symbols—red and brown—are thought to be lower than whiteness, as well. Because of the dominance and pervasiveness of the symbol whiteness, it is problematic for the masses of people to live out the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr.; namely, to live in a society where people are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. King’s vision was not a colorless society. Such a thought, at best, is illusory. I say this because a colorless society goes against the life process itself, which contains diversity in skin color. And, if it is against life, it is against God. Rather, King’s vision means a repudiation of bigotry, racism, prejudice, and stereotypes.5 Ethnicities associated with whiteness assimilate into a melting pot of sameness, based on skin color. Although many African Americans attempt to become white through the bleaching of their skin, straightening their hair, and other skillful tactics, negating their identity, they cannot melt. Other social ethnic groups of color continue to stand over against blackness for acceptability. It is important to note that African Americans are unlike all other social ethnic groups in America. All social ethnic groups migrated to America with the exception of African Americans and American Indians. African Americans were forced to come to America; and they came as slaves. All other social ethnic groups came voluntarily. Also, their dark skin complexion is unique and fundamentally different from others. American Indians are the only indigenous ethnic social group in America. A significant characteristic of symbols is that they point beyond themselves to something else.6 Whiteness points to a particular ethnic social group, which contains its social dimensions. Also, it points to ultimate reality, which contains its spiritual dimensions. Whiteness includes the core values of the Christian faith. Because the Christian church validates this, Martin Luther King, Jr. discovered many racists believed that their skin color endowed them with the right to be first. In other words, as the symbol of whiteness points to ultimate reality, members of that social group participate in the reality to which the symbol points. In its early development, we moved from the

128

Handbook of African American Theology

symbol of whiteness functioning merely as an ideological folk expression, into an institutionalized phenomenon, for the purpose of sustaining the white community as first. Social institutions have done just the opposite to the symbol blackness. The prevailing orientation, which the idea of God takes in the Christian church and among conventional theologians, is conformity to the conceptual paradigm in race relations dominating the process of assimilation and acculturation in the American society. The paradigm is the normativity and centrality of whiteness impacting both secular and sacred dimensions of reality. What is the core of the race problem? It remains the symbol of whiteness functioning as superior and valuation. And, on the other hand, the symbol of blackness functions as inferior and devaluation. This racial polarization took an in-depth development in the social construction of race. Another essential aspect of symbols is that they open up dimensions of the self which otherwise would not be available. For example, the arts create symbols which otherwise would be closed. Pictures and poems point to levels of reality through symbols, which cannot be reached scientifically. Depths of the soul are opened up to us through symbols. We can see this clearly in Rudolf Otto’s classic study, The Idea of The Holy.7 He called it the numinous, which is the experience of the holy. In the experience, one encounters what is best described as awesome, fascinating, overwhelming, wonderful, ineffable, and irreducible. The numinous makes us spellbound. It is an experience taking us beyond our senses. Otto described it as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It means the mystery of God is disclosed in an in-depth manner. It comes only through the grace and mercy of God. It cannot be coerced into disclosure. In order for symbols to bring this element of awe, mystery, and wonder out of individuals, we must remove the barriers from them. Whiteness is a symbol of oppression. The idea of superiority contained within it maintains a barrier to the human spirit. It is a good thing that blacks are now using the category “African American” for social ethnic group identity formation. The time is now for all persons using “whiteness” as the conventional category for social ethnic group identity formation to engage in both a deconstruction and a reconstruction. This has to be done with deep intentionality and passion. As Paul Tillich reminds us, symbols cannot be produced intentionally. “They grow out of the individual or collective unconscious and cannot function without being accepted by the unconscious dimension of our being.” How, then, do we make this happen on a large scale?

God and the social construction of race It is important to note that the idea of race is a modern social construction. The scholar David Theo Goldberg, in Racist Culture, reinforces this, pointing out that “racial definition and its attendant forms of racist articulation emerge only with the institution of modernity.”8 However, it did not emerge out of a vacuum. Rather, it emerged within a cultural milieu containing social and religious dimensions. The architects of the color line, for example, found the dualistic world view present in traditional Christian theology, with its gulf between God and the world, a convenient weapon to give divine

The Reality of God and Racism

129

sanction and validation to developing a polarization between black people and whites. Using skin color as the basis of classification, they argued “black skin was a punishment from God” and other myths.9 They invoked upon African Americans the curses of Cain, the slayer of his brother, and Ham, son of Noah, who saw his father drunk and naked in his tent. Some argue that the concept of “race” adheres to social, cultural, political, and scientifically “outmoded beliefs about the inherent superiority and inferiority of groups based on racial distinctions.” The problem remains today lethal and devastating among oppressed ethnic minority social groups. Centuries after its construction by “Anglo-Europeans, especially English,” in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, race contributed to the holocaust of the 1960s, which led to countless race riots during the 1970s in major cities throughout the United States.10 These events literally threatened the fabric of America. Our entire way of life, liberty, social justice, and freedom were being compromised by the poison of racism. The polarization had reached unprecedented heights. In response, the President of the United States authorized a Commission to do a comprehensive study to determine what happened, why it happened, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again. The United States Riot Commission Report concluded, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white— separate and unequal.”11 The scholar Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, in Race and the Enlightenment, brings to the forefront a hidden notion present in some major voices in the Enlightenment—Hume, Kant, Hegel, and others—that contributed to the formation of the concept of race.12 They helped to shape “Europe’s sense not only of its cultural but also racial superiority.” He helps us to see, in a collection of several essays, that “reason” and “civilization,” for example, were almost synonymous with the white population and northern Europe, while on the other hand, unreason and savagery were conveniently associated with the non-whites, the “black,” the “red,” the “yellow,” persons outside of Europe. The reasoning behind making this idea of “social and cultural superiority” characteristic of white people over against black persons, and all other ethnic social groups, is clarified by Winthrop D. Jordan in White Over Black. The dark skin complexion of Africans was a useful color. It served as a convenient tool to place them in a distinct category. It gave to Europeans a complete polar position from which they could then categorize and calculate the skin colors of all humankind in the world. Jordan puts it this way: “Probably as much as any single factor, the Negro’s blackness lay at the root of the eventual European predilection for dividing the world’s population into “white men” and “colored.”13 This is to recognize, as Sherrow O. Pinder puts it, that Europeans were not capable of dealing with the intricate “Quintessential African Culture.” Therefore, the immediate contact between the English and Africans provided the means for the English to describe the Africans as “blacks,” different types of social beings “that stood in the way of human beings.” Amidst such social and cultural context, regardless of how one wished to describe social groups (tawny, copper, yellow, red, or brown), Africans/African Americans were black and “Europeans, happily, were white.” This notion of lightness in skin complexion was projected into a consciousness of social and cultural superiority.14

130

Handbook of African American Theology

God, lightness, darkness, evil, and race It is true, as we have observed in the above discussion, that the technical category of race, as we know it today, is the result of a modern social construction. But we must keep in mind the vast impact the past has in the accumulation and development of knowledge. The ancient Geek philosophical tradition continues to impact Western culture greatly. We can see this clearly in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead reminds us that all Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. John Hick helps us to see, for example, how Plato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul was baptized into Christian theology and remains prevalent even today. The traditional Christian notion of God is shaped greatly by Plato’s dualistic metaphysics. And the roots of deism, which continue to be prevalent in our culture, grow out of the thinking of Aristotle, the father of deism in the West. We can see the influence, in Western culture, in the manner in which the idea of “the dark horse” prevails in sport’s commentators. It comes out of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus. Persons of the dialogue are Socrates and Phaedrus. Love is the focal point. The discussion takes the form of “The soul described under the image of two winged horses and a charioteer.” The white horse is a symbol of the good and the black horse is a symbol of bad. The white horse represents honor, modesty, temperance, and true glory. He doesn’t need the touch of the whip; rather, he is touched by word and admonition only. The white horse is driven by rational impulse, while, on the other hand, the black horse represents the sensual or concupiscent element of human nature. He is driven by pride and needs both the whip and the spur for directionality.15 In Western culture we have associated darkness (including skin color) with evil and whiteness (including skin color) with the good.16 Our inability to deal creatively with the polar opposites of black and white prohibits our ability to develop a model of social pluralism, void of racism. We have compartmentalized the reality of God exclusively into goodness. I think the nature of God, as I will seek to show, contains the bigger picture of reality. God is inclusive of the totality of reality, including both black and white. Darkness and evil are not metaphysical entities that are separate and exclusive of God’s presence. Such a dualism is to be found in Gnosticism. It is not prevalent in the Judeo-Christian tradition in which the world view is not split; where the reality of God is more inclusive of both the good and the bad. This is depicted in Psalm 139:11-12: If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

We continue to do a poor job working this out in our culture, because of racism. Matthew Fox, for example, in Natural Grace, I think does an excellent job working this out, as it relates to physics and mysticism.17 We need to examine the implications for eradicating the problem of racism. Lightness and darkness are two distinct dimensions

The Reality of God and Racism

131

of one and the same process. They are interwoven into a nexus of interdependence and interrelatedness. These divisions are not insulated from each other; they are integral to the existence and sustainability of life itself. Each color configuration compliments the other, while, on the other hand, contrasting. If we can succeed with deconstructing racism, we will be able to maximize the creative potential found in the black/white polarity. The life process consists of both. Alfred North Whitehead, in his magnum opus, Process and Reality, succeeds in resolving the problem in metaphysics, making use of advancements in both science and religion.18 In Whitehead’s thinking, God is the “Fellow Sufferer” who understands the existential plight of all oppressed conditions, including racial discrimination. His thinking goes against the traditional notion of God’s coercive power taking charge through interventions eliminating human suffering. Whitehead takes his clue from the thinking of what the philosopher Plato called “Divine persuasion.”19 In other words, God’s role is to enter into the ugliness of life, enabling us to do the right thing through influencing consciousness. But the question remains, what implications do we find here for resolving the problem of racism? I think far too many members of the dominant social ethnic group, in all fields of scholarship, are too silent about the increasing presence of racism. I wonder, for example, how would the metaphysical resolutions to lightness and darkness look for Matthew Fox and Alfred North Whitehead if both were victims of racial discrimination? What if they were on the bottom looking up, rather than on the top looking down?

Race and the church Christian theologians and church leaders must become more proactive in offering a deconstruction of the symbolism of whiteness. The symbolism of whiteness is the vanguard of individual and institutional racism. And, in reality, the Christian church is much too silent about this. Howard Thurman, in his seminal work Jesus and the Disinherited, helps us to realize that the kerygma, the proclamation of the Good News of salvation, has a basic mission to all persons with their backs against the wall.20 The church needs to minister to poor and oppressed persons who need deep nurturing and power to assist them in realizing dignity and self-respect. Apart from engaging in the necessary prophetic message of deconstructing whiteness, as the sin of pride, arrogance, and self-righteousness, the church runs the risk of supporting the status quo and racial superiority. As Thurman puts it, the church needs to avoid normalizing the core values of whiteness as part of the same dualistic-hierarchical model which the larger society uses to oppress African Americans and other persons of color. The church, too often, aligns itself with the dominant culture, the powerful, and the strong, over against the weak and oppressed. There is a fundamental reason why conventional church leaders, religious philosophers, and theologians have been much too confused and ambiguous on this issue. The Christian church seems to be more interested in sustaining respectability and security, as Thurman puts it, than in efforts to maintain moral accountability to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

132

Handbook of African American Theology

We have succeeded in desegregating social institutions, including the Christian church, but we remain segregated spiritually. The quest of freedom and liberation, based on the shifting paradigm of social pluralism, must include a deconstruction of the oppressive language that sustains individual and institutional racism. Christian theologians and church leaders cannot afford to move at a horse-and-buggy pace in overcoming this problem. The deconstruction has to begin with the symbolism of both whiteness and blackness. They are the raw material of racism; or, to put it another way, they are the two pillars of racism. And, the Christian church is the fountainhead of both because they flow throughout the language found in spiritual formation activities, worship, hymns, and Holy Communion. The symbol white depicts light, joy, divine power, righteousness, gaiety, peace, truth, modesty, happiness, regeneration, delicacy, and triumph—just to name a few categories. The symbol black includes, as Matthew Lackiesh puts it, curse, mourning, wickedness, evil, horror, death, and despair. Some of the categories used in the folk tradition include “a black soul,” “the blackness of an action,” “the dark horse,” “a white lie,” “the black sheep of the family,” “the white dove,” “the innocent whiteness of the lily,” and “a dark deed”—just to name a few of them.21 This is why Lipton Pope, the former Dean of Yale Divinity School, made the observation that the Christian church is the biggest segregated social institution in American society.22 This makes the eleven o’clock hour on Sunday morning the most segregated time. And, the most segregated school remains the Sunday school. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the church has “a high blood count of creeds and an anemia of deeds!”23 It is not coincidental. In other words, we worship color on Sunday mornings. Ideas related to whiteness and blackness have the same meaning in the Christian church that we find in the larger cultural context, just as the symbol whiteness, pointing to the normative social group and to the reality of Heaven, is valued in the church. We find blackness, pointing to African Americans and to evil, is devalued in the church. The Christian church has failed in a deconstruction of the language of oppression, as has the larger society. We cannot make a fundamental paradigm shift from a society of exclusivism to one of inclusivism without making a deconstruction of language. For example, whiteness is related to purity, which is very prevalent during Holy Communion, Easter, and other special days. We can see this in the hymns that we sing. In each case blackness or darkness depict evil which we have associated with race. The language in the church reinforces the problem of the color line. The failure of the church to deconstruct it is to sustain a wall of insulation between people. We have an oppressive language barrier in church and community. Before we can deal with making systemic measures of revolutionary change in the lives of people, the language barrier has to be revisited. Although in the church the language of brotherhood, sisterhood, the love of neighbor, and the love of God, is used often, the model of social pluralism informing each category is much too monolithic. The movement is one-directional in that it uses whiteness as the benchmark of normativity and centrality. In every case whiteness is used in the context of valuation, and blackness as devaluation. This is why in the desegregation of public schools, African American schools are dissolved, not white schools; and students are now being bussed to white schools. The mentality

The Reality of God and Racism

133

driving desegregation was the inferiority of black social institutions and the superiority of white social institutions. This monolithic pattern is literally destroying the infrastructure of the entire African American community, including economics, politics, medicine, housing, the family, and education. This devaluation of African American social institutions perpetuates the idea of inferiority in the consciousness of both white and African Americans. The problem goes much deeper than perceiving resources to be qualitatively better in the white communities; rather, it continues to mean the resources in the African American community are inherently inferior to those in the white community. Again, it sustains the principle of devaluing the African American experience in contrast to valuing the white experience.

God, morality, culture, and Christian discipleship Martin Luther King, Jr. realized that in order for American society to make a transition from the closed society of Jim Crowism to an open one of inclusiveness, it would take the spiritual transformation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The increasing presence of individual and institutional racism which we are experiencing in all sectors of American society questions the moral character of America. The classic study of Gunnar Myrdal, entitled An American Dilemma, was based on the premise that at bottom our problem in race relations is the moral dilemma. He viewed it as the conflict between the moral valuations on various levels of consciousness and generality. “The American Dilemma . . . is the ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on the general plane which we shall call the ‘American Creed,’ which the American thinks, talks, and, on the other hand, the valuations on specific planes of individual and group living where personal and local interests,”24 and other social issues, dominate the thinking of Americans. I think it is much easier for an individual to be transformed by acquiring a new sense of race consciousness than it is for the masses. Symbols emerge out of the collective unconscious of the community. It takes the community to share in the transformation of symbols. Because racism has persisted at the heart of American society for centuries, our tolerance level for it is very high. We can see this acting itself out in the Christian church, as well as other social institutions. Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, shares my question about the moral character of the American society. He says, “It is hopeless for [the African American] to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him, merely by trusting in the moral sense of the white race.”25 Why is this the case? While reflecting critically on the insights of Myrdal and Niebuhr, it is clear to me that spiritual and social transformation of the individual does not take place in a vacuum. All culture is learned behavior. Persons are not born racists. They are conditioned into racist behavior by the cultural milieu, such as television, the mass media, radio, online, newspapers, books, and other forms of communication. It is done contextually; meaning it involves cultural conditioning. Babies, for example, are innocent when it comes to skin color discrimination. They become socialized and acculturated into color discrimination.

134

Handbook of African American Theology

They inherit racism from present and past generations. In other words, individual and institutional racism fit a cultural pattern which we transmit from one generation to the next. It is an integral part of the status quo. In its interpretation of morality, the Christian church continues to find ways to reinforce the status quo through what Dietrich Bonhoeffer refers to as cheap grace.26 We cannot disregard the importance of culture. “Culture is the ‘artificial, secondary environment’ which man superimposes on the natural. It comprises language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values.”27 Each of these categories of culture is invaded with the symbol of whiteness, the raw material of individual and institutional racism. When we add things like economics, social status, education, and politics to the list, it helps us to better understand just how deeply persons become invested in particular cultural patterns. And, it makes spiritual and social transformation extremely difficult to make happen when it includes a repudiation of racism. Because racism has become part of the very fabric of the American society, it has become a lifestyle for the American people. We have used legislation in the desegregation of the societal infrastructure, making social integration possible; but we cannot legislate morality, social relations, and interpersonal group dynamics. Personal and institutional racism, along with the recurring problem of the color line, make social integration, at best, problematic. How do whites and persons of color learn to relate to each other beyond “psychological barriers which have traditionally separated them in our society”? Now, keep in mind, these psychological and cultural barriers have persisted for centuries. What we have today amounts to a society in which persons are physically desegregated, but spiritually segregated, as King puts it. The exclusionary principle, which the Christian church perpetuates, reinforces the race problem. It amounts to what Bonhoeffer refers to in The Cost of Discipleship as cheap grace. “Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. ‘All for sin could not atone.’ ” Problems of racism and the color line go on today as they have for centuries, “and we are still sinners, even in the best life.” In other words, we have learned to make the existence of racism and the color line integral parts of our comfort zones. This kind of spiritual nurturing of racism is what led to the birth of the African American church. In other words, whites find a way to define and affirm the Christian faith in a way that excludes persons of color. In Richard Allen’s autobiography, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labors, he explains what happened when the number of African Americans attending St. George Methodist Church increased.28 They were forced to worship in segregated locations within the church, around the walls or in the gallery. While on their knees in prayer, Allen heard one of the trustees forcing Reverend Absalom Jones to get up off his knees. He said, “You must get up—you must not kneel here.” When Reverend Jones asked for the trustee to wait until prayer was over, the trustee then asked another trustee to come to his aid and help him, literally, pull Reverend Jones up off of his knees. Allen reports, “By this time prayer was over, and we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with us in the church.” This incident gave rise to the birth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. A very similar incident took place at the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City, in

The Reality of God and Racism

135

1796, when the Servant Leader, James Varick, and a small group of worshippers were forced to walk out in protest of racism, which gave rise to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. As we will seek to point out later, a doctrine of God which speaks to the freedom and liberation of the oppressed must include the principles of self-empowerment, selfdetermination, and self-development. It breaks down the cycle of dependency, and moves to the level of interdependence. To get to this we must, first of all, decentralize white normativity. We cannot have one ethnic social group maintaining the yardstick for all other groups. Each social group must be perceived as special, functioning alongside the specialness of all other social groups. We must break down the existing monolithic cultural ethos and develop a pluralistic ethos. Each social ethnic group is to be valued, and no social group is to be devalued. Cultural patterns are different; none is superior or inferior to others. Institutional racism undermines pluralism and uses God talk to sanction what I am referring to as an exclusionary principle. Such a notion flows through both secular and sacred dimensions of American society.

The role of God in race relations One important function of the reality of God is to safeguard the human spirit from projecting any category within experience as ultimate, as we have done with the symbol whiteness. It is a case of idolatry. We worship color in America. We think of God as solely the highest being alongside other beings, containing all power and ensuring the supremacy of white America. This is why we often say in acts of patriotism, “It is for God and country.” In human relations, God is interpreted over against the other, not in relationship with the other. The other becomes adversarial, the enemy. This is why the transcendence of God must be interpreted to exist beyond all phenomena. Therefore, it is necessary for the reality of God to contain two natures. The primordial nature of God, traditionally referred as God’s transcendence, is essential. At this level, God is beyond the world. On the one hand, God is the creator of time and space; on the other hand, God transcends all time and space. In this manner, God is the source of all reality. Tillich refers to God as the ground of Being; Whitehead calls God the reservoir of all possibilities. God provides unending inexhaustible possibilities flowing from God’s primordial nature. God directs, through persuasive power, these possibilities, as they seek realization in the world. The hymnologist speaks to this in referring to God as “our help in ages past, and our hope in years to come.” The theologian Langdon Gilkey puts it this way: at the primordial level, God transcends all acts of experience, including substances, causes, and ordinary relations. God is not affected by creatures; nor is God dependent upon them. God is changeless and permanent. Also, very importantly, God is distinguishable from the totality of creatures in the world. Nothing within human experience, regardless of its importance, is to be placed alongside God’s transcendent nature. In this regard, a particular social ethnic group cannot compartmentalize the nature of God. Such a notion differs significantly from the idea of God found in traditional Christian theism, in which God was thought to be the highest being alongside other

136

Handbook of African American Theology

beings, and so it became fashionable to ascribe anthropomorphic qualities to God, projecting the symbol of whiteness onto God’s essence. The issue for us to consider now is determining how the reality of God can relate to multi-ethnic social groups in a manner overcoming the problem of racism and the color line. This brings into focus the need to define and clarify the role of the consequent nature of God. There is a reciprocal relationship between God’s primordial and consequent natures. We have talked about the primordial nature of God, which is beyond the world. It is the transcendent aspect of God. The portion of God’s nature which relates to the world is called immanence, the within. God is both without and within, at the same time. In God’s transcendence, God is static, and in God’s immanence, God is inclusive of change. What is done in Heaven impacts the world, and what is done in the world impacts Heaven. The prayer of Jesus was, “Let thy will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven.” The kingdom of God is beyond the world, while at the same time realizing itself in the world, existentially; the kingdom of God reaches significant points of realization, on a daily basis. When we look at the masses of people, we can really see major problems with racism. But when we look at particular persons, as King often said, “of good will,” we can see the expressed image of the kingdom of God reflected in their approach in race relations. The dynamic reciprocal relationship between the primordial and consequent natures of God makes this possible. It is called, eschatologically, the present and not-yet dimensions of God’s kingdom. Some people become exemplary models of the kingdom of God on earth. None of us is ever the finality. The not-yet dimensions keep us moving forward. The final consummation is always ahead of us. This is the case. Despite the increasing presence of racism, classism, sexism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism, God’s beatific vision of brotherhood and sisterhood is achieved, existentially, on a daily basis. In the primordial nature God is distinguishable from the totality of all creatures in the world. And, in God’s consequent nature, God is inclusive of all creatures in the world. These two must always remain in creative relationship. We reject, therefore, the idea of normativity and centrality in relation to the white social ethnic group. We also repudiate the idea of superiority, supremacy, and special privilege, in reference to the white social group. Since the natural world is forever changing continuously, it necessitates God’s consequent nature to be inclusive of change and the totality of all creatures in the world. God initiates the highest possibilities for each creature, while, at the same time, participating with each creature in its own self-actualization. To project whiteness as the normative symbol for all creatures in the world violates the inherent creative process in the world. God’s nature includes all colors, including white, black, red, brown, and so forth. There is no such phenomenon as “a colorless society.” Such a notion is contrary to the inherent creative evolutionary process, as well as the nature of God. The variety of colors and diversity of ethnic physical configurations are natural and beautiful. They amount to what we call novelty and originality. They are descriptive of reality itself. The problem of the color line is based on a split world view separating and compartmentalizing reality at all levels, spiritual, social, and physical. Such configuration was convenient for oppressors to consign African Americans and other social ethnic groups to an existence outside the main flow of divine creativity.

The Reality of God and Racism

137

African Americans have reacted against this ever since the inception of the modern institution of slavery in America. They have never said “yes” to oppressive forces. Whether they worked with direct social action of protestation, models of accommodation, non-violence, or violent militancy, African Americans always engaged in affirming God as the force of liberation; they continue to say “no” to all forms of oppression. This fits very well into God’s role of forever keeping the highest possibilities before the human spirit. Shortly after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, African Americans found themselves “powerless.” Although the old “Jim Crow” laws were slowly being broken down and rejected, permitting African Americans to move into social integration, including public schools, restaurants, social and spiritual institutions, and all public accommodations, African Americans suddenly realized that problems related to the color line, individual and institutional racism, were not abandoned. This gave rise to the slogan “black power.” It was an essential process of social ethnic group contextualization. This was a manifestation of group pride and self-identity formation. What is now prevailing within the arena of a new identity formation,“African American,” is beyond the color line. I think it points in the right direction. All social ethnic groups need to abandon skin color as the point of identity formation. It originated in oppression and needs to be deconstructed.

Conclusion The road towards the achievement of freedom and liberation for the oppressed and oppressor is to begin with a systematic deconstruction of skin color, as it relates to social ethnic identifty formation. This takes us beyond the color line into a reconstruction of social ethnic formation, pointing in the direction of inclusiveness and social integration.

Notes W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1978), 1–20. John Hope Franklin, The Color Line (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1993), 1–37. Martin Buber, I and Thou (Mansfield, CT: Martino Publishing, 2010), 1–30. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vols. 1–3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), Vol. 1, 163–210. 5 Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp, Jr., Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1974), 120–40. 6 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 41–54. 7 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of The Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), 150. 8 David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 21. 9 John Hope Franklin, ed., Color and Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 36. 10 Audrey Smedley, “The History of The Idea of Race . . . And Why It Matters,” a paper presented at the conference “Race, Human Variation and Disease: Consensus and Frontiers,” sponsored by the American Anthropological Association and funded by 1 2 3 4

138

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Handbook of African American Theology the Ford Foundation, held March 14–17, 2007, in Warrenton, Virginia. http://www. understandingrace.org/resources/pdf/disease/smedley.pdf Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 1. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 1–8. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550– 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 253. Margaret Hunter, “The Persistent Problem of Colorism: Skin Tone, Status, and Inequality,” Sociology Compass 1, no. 1 (2007): 237–50. For further discussion on Thurman’s work and the mission of the church, see Henry James Young, “The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church: Historical and Theological Significance,” The A.M.E. Zion Quarterly Review 131, no. 2 (2018): 9–15. Teresa J. Guess, “The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence,” Critical Sociology 32, Issue 4, 649–71. Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 131–60. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edn. (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 342–51. Benjamin Jowett, ed., The Dialogues of Plato (New York: Random House, 1937), 233–51. For further discussion on Thurman’s work and the mission of the church, see Henry James Young, “The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church: Historical and Theological Significance,” The A.M.E. Zion Quarterly Review 131, no. 2 (2018): 9–15. Franklin, ed., Color and Race, 112–28. Liston Pope, The Kingdom Beyond Caste (New York: Friendship Press, 1961), 105. Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 438–90. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), xlvii. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 252. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 43–78. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 32–3. Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (New York: Abingdon Press, 1960), 15–6.

11

Is Racism in America a Functional Refutation of the Classical Philosophical View of Understanding as Pertaining to Universal Concepts? Cyril Orji

This chapter examines an aspect of the Ferguson, Missouri, incident in which a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager in the summer of 2014; it concludes that the racial fault lines exposed by this event have far-reaching implications beyond race relations. The event exposes wide differences in perception and knowing. The suggestion here is that not only is the Ferguson incident a microcosm of the realities of white Americans and black Americans, but that it is also indicative of the differences in perspectival attitudes between whites and blacks in America—the way they live out the subjectivity of their lives. Drawing from Bernard Lonergan’s intentionality analysis and studies in social psychology that support asymmetry between whites’ and blacks’ perceptions of racial attitudes in contemporary America, this chapter probes the extent to which it can be shown that race(ism) in America is a functional refutation of the classical philosophical school, which incorrectly views understanding as pertaining to universal concepts.

The context: two divergent ways of grasping realities On August 9, 2014, an 18-year-old unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting prompted protests in the city of Ferguson by supporters of Michael Brown. A grand jury was set up to investigate if there was a probable cause to believe the police officer should be charged with a crime. On November 24, 2014, the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, announced that the grand jury, made up of nine whites and three blacks, decided not to indict the police officer. The announcement set off another wave of protests in Ferguson and in some major cities across the country. Ferguson is a predominantly black community, located outside of the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Only four of the 53 commissioned officers in the Ferguson Police Department at the time of the incident were black. The rest were white. Some black leaders, like the Nation of Islam leader, Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan, suggested that

140

Handbook of African American Theology

Ferguson is a microcosm of America, i.e., that Ferguson not only mirrors the reality of blacks in America but also mirrors whites’ limited awareness of discrimination against blacks. The irony of the event in Ferguson is easy to miss. In a landmark case, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public places under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The “separate but equal” doctrine remained a standard US law until its repeal by another compelling ruling, Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The event in Ferguson was a reminder that, despite the rush in some quarters to anoint the contemporary United States of America as “post-racial” in the wake of President Barrack Obama’s election as president (2009–17), a new wave of race-related controversy that is gaining traction needs to be addressed.1 Racism is a complex phenomenon and takes different forms. It is also very hard to measure. One of the reasons why it is hard to measure is not because it is fringe, but because “racism doesn’t require hatred, constant expression, or even conscious awareness.”2 In all its expressions, racism is what it is: “a moral corruption built on intellectual fallacy and exists as a construction invented for the very purpose of violence.”3 One line of social psychological research revolves around the idea that “a new form of racism has taken over the political once played by ‘old-fashioned,’ ‘redneck,’ or ‘Jim Crow’ racism.”4 Some of these new forms often go under the labels “modern racism,” “symbolic racism,” “subtle racism,” “racial resentment,” “aversive racism,” “racial ambivalence,” or laissez-faire racism.”5 Racism is intrinsically connected to whites’ and other ethnic minorities’ (e.g., blacks’) perception of social and political conditions in society. In the United States, perceptions of race, inequality, and discrimination generally break down along racial lines. A body of research supports anecdotal evidence that “an increasing perception gap divides White and Black Americans’ opinions on social conditions.”6 Why do white and black Americans perceive the same thing and differ in their conclusions? According to a Washington Post poll conducted immediately after the Ferguson incident, whites in Ferguson were often surprised by the racial fault lines exposed by the shooting of Michael Brown and the angry protests that followed it. “They said they had no idea of the simmering tensions between African Americans and police. They did not know that many Black residents felt unfairly targeted by the police and unrepresented by city government. And they bristled when protesters portrayed their town as racist.”7 Whites’ limited awareness of racial problems in Ferguson mirrors the reality of most of white America. “A series of surveys in recent years about Americans’ perceptions of the very existence of racism and racial disparities in our society shows that White people believe the problem of racial bias against Blacks has effectively faded as a national issue.”8 Many other polls suggest: l

l l

White Americans are less likely than black Americans to think that blacks are being discriminated against. Blacks are more likely to see racism as a problem than whites are. About 56 percent of blacks think there is a lot of discrimination in America today as against 16 percent of whites who think discrimination is a problem today.

Racism and the View of Understanding l

l

l

l

141

According to a 2014 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey, 51 percent of white Americans say the criminal justice system is biased against blacks; 84 percent of blacks and 60 percent of Latinos say it is biased against blacks. According to data examined by Harvard University Professor Michael Norton, 75 percent of blacks think they make less money than whites (a view that is in line with official statistics, according to the Washington Post) as against only 37 percent of whites who think blacks make less money than whites do. A 2014 Pew poll found that 80 percent of blacks believe the events in Ferguson raise important issues about race and that the police went too far in the shooting of the unarmed black teen as against 37 percent of whites who thought race was getting too much attention in the case. A Huffington Post/YouGov poll found that 62 percent of African Americans believed Officer Wilson was at fault in the shooting of Mr. Brown, as against only 22 percent of whites who took that position.

One way of knowing One of Bernard Lonergan’s early discoveries was what he termed “insight”—an act of human understanding. This discovery was occasioned by many factors, chief of which was his reading of Aristotle’s De Anima. His interpretation of this Aristotelian text, coupled with his own Ignatian exercises, led Lonergan to the basic fact that “when insights occur in consciousness, they always arise out of images and are situated in relation to those images out of which they arise.”9 With this discovery, Lonergan departed from long-standing traditions in scholasticism with respect to human understanding. Classical scholasticism and even some more recent philosophical schools “tended to regard understanding as principally concerned with universal concepts, rather than with concrete images.”10 Classical scholasticism, and the new forms of philosophical schools that hold similar views, think that in understanding, one understands concepts. By so doing, they neglected the role of the imagination in understanding. It was to Lonergan’s credit that he not only complained about this neglect, he radically departed from it.11 By contrast, Lonergan pays attention to human intentionality—how one might know that something is the case and that it cannot possibly be otherwise. Whereas older Catholic philosophy and theology employed faculty psychology, which distinguished between intellect and will, Lonergan makes a clean break from faculty psychology. He sees faculty psychology as no longer adequate to know things as they are because intellect and will, which are the bread and butter of faculty psychology, are not given directly to consciousness but only through metaphysics.12 Lonergan instead chooses to speak of the conscious intending subject who lives in his or her own world. “That world is usually a bounded world, and its boundary is fixed by the range of our interests and our knowledge.”13 He sees in human subjects an intersubjective solidarity and therefore divides the structure of human consciousness into a series of successive levels. The level of experience produces ideas and concepts that lead to the next level, the level of reflection, which in turn leads to a further level, the level of judgment. He sees the goal of this dynamic human activity as leading to cognitional self-transcendence. The capacity for

142

Handbook of African American Theology

self-transcendence, he explains, is revealed in the spontaneity of questions for intelligence, for reflection, and for deliberation. Lonergan correctly takes for granted that experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding is a spontaneous activity of the human spirit. For him, in so far as one is open to the gift of God’s love, this spontaneous activity “sets up a new horizon in which the love of God will transvalue our values and the eyes of that love will transform our knowing.”14 He recognizes, to his credit, that each one is confined by his or her horizons, and that these confinements may have resulted “from the historical tradition within which we are born, from the limitations of the social milieu in which we are brought up, from our individual psychological aptitudes, efforts, [and] misadventures.”15 Lonergan makes a concerted effort to restore the proper relationship between understanding and images, which classical theology and some recent forms of philosophical trends have neglected. “Whereas the older scholastic theory held that understanding can occur after the concepts first ‘pop unconsciously’ into consciousness through a foggy process of abstraction, Lonergan discovered through examining his own consciousness that, in fact, understanding comes first, and then serves as the ground out of which concepts are formulated.”16 Although Lonergan did not address the explosive matter of race, he was grounded in social psychology and paid attention to what it is in the human person that leads to decisions that lead society to cumulative progress and decline. Granted that the kind of racism that plays out in the United States was not an area to which he devoted attention, it would be jejune to expect him to explain whether the spontaneous activity of the human spirit he develops so well in his intentionality analysis is determined by one’s ethnicity or race. Although he does not explain (and in truth, does not need to) whether whites and blacks can come to the same conclusions, if given the same data, he emphasizes the fundamental role played by questions in the process of coming to an understanding. Because he underscores the overwhelming influence of bias (flight from understanding) in human activity and in the process of knowing, he does not need to explain whether the verification process of data, which follows reflection and deliberation, can be prejudiced or enhanced (as the case may be) in a particular way because of a person’s ethnicity or race. For Lonergan, prejudices and mistaken beliefs cut across racial fault lines. “Besides the false belief there is the false believer. One has to look into the manner in which one happened to have accepted erroneous beliefs and one has to try to discover and correct the carelessness, the credulity, the bias that led one to mistake the false for the true.”17 It is the role of social psychology, not intentionality analysis, to determine the extent to which a person’s ethnicity or race clouds their judgment. Social psychology supports the idea that whites and blacks perceive social conditions differently. Janice E. Hale has shown how cultural dissonance can and does occur when black children are placed in educational settings designed for white children.18 She extrapolated from this to show how the realm of feeling, affect, and the cognitive processes arising from interpersonal relations have far-reaching implications for adult black people.

Two divergent perceptions of racial progress Research in social psychology indicates that whites and blacks differ significantly in their perceptions of racial progress in the United States. Eibach and Keegan found a

Racism and the View of Understanding

143

consistent pattern with historically dominant groups (e.g., white Americans) perceiving greater progress toward equality than historically subordinate groups (e.g. black Americans).19 For example: l

l

l

l

In a June 2000 survey by the New York Times about how much progress had been made in the United States since the 1960s in eliminating racial discrimination, 74 percent of white respondents thought that “a lot of real progress” had been made while only 54 percent of black respondents thought the same. In a 1998 General Social Survey regarding whether the conditions for blacks had improved over the prior few years, 67 percent of whites answered in the affirmative and only 46 percent of blacks thought conditions had improved. In a 1992 National Election Study, 37 percent of whites judged that the position of blacks had improved “a lot” and only 16 percent of blacks thought so. In 1998/1999 a Multi-Investigator Study asked whether the racial income gap had changed during the previous ten years; 72 percent of whites judged that the gap had decreased and only 38 percent of blacks thought so.

The difference in judgment of racial progress between whites and blacks in the United States is perhaps a complex phenomenon that is influenced by several factors that are by no means incompatible.20 One main contributing cause is bias. Lonergan aptly describes bias as a block or distortion of the intellectual development of a person. The intellectual distortion can occur in four principal ways: “There is the bias of unconscious motivation brought to light by depth psychology. There is the bias of individual egoism, and the more powerful and blinder bias of group egoism. Finally, there is the general bias of common sense, which is a specialization of intelligence in the particular and concrete.”21 Beyond what Lonergan technically calls bias, there are also social psychological explanations for differences in judgments of racial attitudes between whites and blacks. Kahneman and Tversky discovered a property of subjective evaluation they labelled loss aversion—“a systematically different evaluation of concessions made and concessions received.”22 Building on this theory, Eibach and Keegan argue that loss aversion “can help explain racial differences in assessments of minority groups, if it is assumed that White Americans tend to view increases in racial equality as losses for their group, whereas Black Americans view increases in equality as gains for their group.”23 They argue that because dominant groups (such as whites) often develop antiegalitarian orientation to defend their traditional privileges they “frame hierarchy attenuating changes as losses for themselves.”24 Even those whites who endorse ideals of racial equality implicitly have some “discomfort about racial minority gains when they believe those gains threaten their own privileges.”25 There is support for this in what social psychologists call Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). The theory indicates that some groups are more social-dominance-oriented, in part, because societies are organized into group-based hierarchies. Men, for example, are more social dominance-oriented than women.26 SDO theory “postulates that societies minimize group conflict by creating consensus on ideologies that promote the superiority of one group over others.”27 Using this theory, Eibach and Keegan conclude that “White Americans’ reluctance to relinquish privilege would contribute to divergences in White and Black Americans’ perceptions of progress toward racial equality. White Americans’ aversion to conceding privilege may explain why they judge those concessions, and

144

Handbook of African American Theology

hence Blacks’ progress toward equality, to have been more substantial than regarded by Black Americans.”28 Norton and Sommers have also suggested that there is in fact a new trend gaining traction among whites in contemporary America: “the notion that Whites have replaced Blacks as the primary victims of discrimination. This emerging perspective is particularly notable because by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans.”29 Norton and Sommers’s research suggests that whites view racism as a zero-sum game in such a way that they associate decreases in anti-black racism with increases in perceived anti-white racism, whereas blacks are less likely to perceive gains for blacks as losses for whites. Kleugel and Smith have also proposed what is known as attributional accounts for the differences in white and black Americans’ views of racial progress.30 “They demonstrated that White Americans tend to attribute present-day racial inequalities to intrinsic dispositional causes, such as lack of motivation. In contrast, Black Americans emphasize situational causes, such as institutionalized racism and discrimination.”31 In other words, racial groups differ in their attributions about who or what is responsible for the progress toward equality—“that Whites would tend to attribute racial progress more to their own group’s efforts (e.g., granting rights and privileges) while non-Whites would tend to focus on the efforts of their groups in winning rights and dismantling barriers to equality.”32 Social psychological research also tends to stress the importance of reference points in judgment. According to this psychological research, “White Americans tend to compare the present to the past when segregation and institutionalized discrimination were at their peaks. Non-White Americans, in contrast, tend to judge progress by comparing the present to the way things would be if the dream of racial equality were fully realized.”33

Implications for human knowing How does one interpret the differences in racial attitudes between blacks and whites? Why do whites and blacks look at the same set of facts and see different truths or realities? Lonergan is correct, regarding the objectivity of truth—that intentionally it is independent of the subject, but ontologically resides in the subject because “the subject is capable of an intentional self-transcendence, of going beyond what he feels, what he imagines, what he thinks, what seems to him, to something utterly different, to what is so.”34 Differences in racial attitudes also underscore Lonergan’s point that understanding does not emerge from a foggy process of abstraction (the way the old scholastics thought), but by concrete images by which concepts are then formed. It is foolhardy to think that the differences in racial attitudes suggest that whites and blacks intend differently and apprehend differently. A black person can be surrounded by evidence of racism while the white person next to him or her denies or does not see any evidence. If understanding were to emerge from a process of abstraction, as some of the old scholastics thought, would both blacks and whites not see the same evidence with respect to racism? Lonergan was clear that his transcendental method has an inner core and an outer core. The inner core is transcultural. The inner core is guided by God’s gift of love,

Racism and the View of Understanding

145

which God gives to all peoples. It is only in its outer manifestation that there are variations.35 Perhaps it is in the latter, i.e., the outer core, that one might situate the differences in racial attitudes between whites and blacks. To be clear, the gap between blacks’ and whites’ assessments of racial progress has far-reaching implications; it contributes to other substantive disagreements that might be social, political, or even religious. In practical terms, their differing judgments about racial progress may influence concrete government policies, say in affirmative action or other interventions to foster racial equality.36 Pratto et al. have argued that the ubiquitous nature of groupbased prejudice that is captured in social dominance orientation (SDO) succeeds because, as ideologies, they are widely accepted within a society and they appear as self-apparent truths.37 Thus, the gap in the way blacks and whites see or view a phenomenon does not raise questions regarding whether blacks and whites apprehend differently, but suggests rather that there are variations in the manifestation of the outer core of their intentionality. For the outer core is not only historically conditioned, it is subject to modification and corruption.38 The following four points are, therefore, useful for consideration, with respect to the outer core:

1. Racial identity and subjective experience Lowery, Knowles, and Unzueta’s study shows that racial identity shapes whites’ subjective experience in more important ways than previously acknowledged. Take the example cited already that whites tend to frame advances toward racial equality as losses for whites, i.e., as zero-sum. However, the perception that opportunities for blacks are zerosum does not mean that they are actually zero-sum. “Although White advantage and Black disadvantage are often intimately connected—with Black ‘disaccumulation’ leading directly to White ‘accumulation’—dominant-group members’ choice of interpretative frame can nonetheless profoundly affect their psychological experience of social inequity.”39

2. Association of race with prejudicial behavior The suggestion that whites and blacks have different experiences and race is tied to behavior is supported by a study by Norton et al. The study finds that, though people vary in their willingness to use certain descriptors to describe others on the basis of appearance, whites are more adept than other groups at identifying other people on the basis of race. The study found that one mechanism for decreasing bias or forestalling associations that result from prejudicial behavior is not to notice someone’s race. Information about race affects a person’s behavior because “noticing race does lead to stereotypic associations, which can in turn lead to prejudicial behavior.”40

3. Predictive validity of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) Pratto et  al. have demonstrated that SDO is strongly related to anti-black racism in America, that individual variation in SDO exists, and “that those who are more

146

Handbook of African American Theology

social-dominance oriented will tend to favor hierarchy-enhancing ideologies and policies, whereas those lower on SDO will tend to favor hierarchy-attenuating ideologies and policies.”41 As members of the dominant group, whites are higher on SDO and will predictably almost always “choose roles that maintain or increase social inequality,” whereas blacks as members of the discriminated group are lower on SDO and will predictably “choose roles that reduce inequality.”42 Social Dominance Orientation can be historically grounded.

4. Whites and other ethnic minorities have different reference points Building on Pettigrew’s study, Eibach and Ehrlinger have found that whites and ethnic minorities differ in the degree to which racial equality represents a central goal for them and in the type of goal that racial progress represents. “For ethnic minorities, progress toward racial equality might more often represent a security goal, whereas for White Americans, progress toward racial equality might more often represent a less urgent, nurturance goal.”43 On the matter of racial progress, white Americans tend to judge racial progress by comparing the present to the way things were in the past in the days of institutionalized discrimination. For white Americans for whom the status quo ante is the reference point, “compared with where we were, there is progress.”44 But ethnic minorities tend to think of racial progress by comparing it with the ideal of full racial equality. For them, “compared to where we should be, that progress is insufficient.”45 Eibach and Ehrlinger conclude that this difference between white Americans and ethnic minorities “powerfully affects social judgments and satisfaction with social conditions.”46 A person’s reference point is capable of shaping or distorting one’s ability to understand correctly, judge correctly, and decide correctly.

Conclusion The explosive subject of race in America may seem to undermine our optimism on ontological solidarity of human persons but cannot destroy it. A fundamental presupposition behind Lonergan’s writings on the human person and one which necessitated his clean break from faculty psychology to intentionality analysis is, as he writes in an early essay, that “the difference between men is less real than the unity of men.”47 Frederick Crowe interprets this to mean “what is first is kind of universal human being, and what comes second is the individuation of this into subsistent persons.”48 Although Lonergan never seemed to have developed this line of thought in his later writings, neither “did he repudiate it.”49 Apart from undermining our optimism on the ontological solidarity of human persons, the racial divide in America has also exposed the gaps in perceptions between whites and blacks. Nevertheless, there is no denying that we all belong to the category of universal human being. The difference in perceptions or attitudes between these whites and blacks, as the events in Ferguson show, is actually due to differences in the “object of judgment,” not due to differences in the “judgment of the object.”50 As we work to heal the wounds of racial division in the United States, we take to heart

Racism and the View of Understanding

147

Lonergan’s admonition: “The greatest of saints have not only their oddities but also their defects, and it is not some but all of us that pray, not out of humility but in truth, to be forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.”51

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

M.I. Norton and S.R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 63 (2011): 215. Charles Blow, “Racism is at the Core of Trump Presidency,” New York Times, January 16, 2018; online: http://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20180116/charles-blow-racism-isat-core-of-trump-presidency; (accessed July 23, 2018.) Charles Blow, “On Race: The Moral High ground,” New York Times, May 31, 2018; online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/opinion/roseanne-valerie-jarrett-racetrump.html; (accessed July 23, 2018.) P.J. Henry and D. Sears, “The Symbolic Racism,” Political Psychology 23 (2002): 254. Ibid. R.P. Eibach and J. Ehrlinger, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: Reference Points and Racial Differences in Assessing Progress Toward Equality,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32 (2006): 75. Michael A. Fletcher, “Whites think discrimination against whites is a bigger problem than bias against blacks,” Washington Post, October 8, 2014; online: https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/08/white-people-think-racialdiscrimination-in-america-is-basically-over/?noredirect=on&utm_term= .9b09d60ecf17; (accessed November 20, 2014.) Ibid. Patrick H. Byrne, “Situating Insight,” Divyadaan 28 (2017): 5. Ibid., 6. Ibid. Bernard Lonergan, “The Subject,” in A Second Collection, ed. William F.J. Ryan and Bernard Tyrell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), x. Ibid., 69. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 106. Lonergan, “The Subject,” 69. Byrne, “Situating Insight,” 7. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 44. Janice E. Hale, Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Style (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). R.P. Eibach and T. Keegan, “Free At Last? Social Dominance, Loss Aversion, and White and Black Americans’ Differing Assessments of Racial Progress,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (2006). Ibid., 465. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 231. Eibach and Keegan, “Free At Last,” 454; D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, Conflict Resolution: A Cognitive Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Eibach and Keegan, “Free At Last,” 454. Ibid.

148

Handbook of African American Theology

25 Ibid., 455. 26 F. Pratto, J. Sidanius, L.M. Stallworth, B.F. Malle, “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994). 27 Ibid., 741. 28 Eibach and Keegan, “Free At Last,” 464. 29 Norton and Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game,” 215. 30 J.R. Kleugel and E.R. Smith, Beliefs About Inequality: Americans’ Views of What Is and What Ought to Be (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1986). 31 Eibach and Keegan, “Free At Last,” 465. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Lonergan, “The Subject,” 70. 35 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 284. 36 Eibach and Keegan, “Free At Last,” 465. 37 Pratto et.al., “Social Dominance Orientation.” 38 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 284. 39 B.S. Lowery, E.D. Knowles, and M.M. Unzueta, “Framing Inequity Safely: Whites’ Motivated Perceptions of Racial Privilege,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33 (2007): 1238. 40 M.I. Norton, S.R. Sommers, E.P. Apfelbaum, N. Pura, and D. Ariely, “Color Blindness and Interracial Interaction: Playing the Political Correctness Game,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 949. 41 Pratto et al., “Social Dominance Orientation,” 742. 42 Ibid. 43 Eibach and Ehrlinger, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” 67. 44 T.F. Pettigrew, How to Think Like a Social Scientist (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 223. 45 Ibid. 46 Eibach and Ehrlinger, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” 67. 47 Bernard Lonergan, “Panton Anakephalaiosis,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 91 (1991): 151. 48 Frederick E. Crowe, Developing the Lonergan Legacy: Historical, Theoretical, and Existential Themes, ed. Michael Vertin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 59. 49 Ibid. 50 S. Asch, “Studies in the Principles of Judgments and Attitudes II: Determination of Judgments by Group and by Ego Standards,” Journal of Social Psychology 12 (1940): 458. 51 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 284.

References Asch, S. “Studies in the Principles of Judgments and Attitudes II: Determination of Judgments by Group and by Ego Standards,” Journal of Social Psychology 12 (1940): 433–65. Blow, C. “Racism is at the Core of Trump Presidency,” New York Times (January 16, 2018); online: http://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20180116/charles-blow-racism-is-at-coreof-trump-presidency; (accessed July 23, 2018.)

Racism and the View of Understanding

149

——. “On Race: The Moral High ground,” New York Times (May 31, 2018); online: https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/opinion/roseanne-valerie-jarrett-race-trump.html; (accessed July 23, 2018.) Byrne, P.H. “Situating Insight,” Divyadaan 28 (2017): 1–28. Crowe, F.E. Developing the Lonergan Legacy: Historical, Theoretical, and Existential Themes, ed. Michael Vertin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Eibach, R.P. and Ehrlinger, J. “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: Reference Points and Racial Differences in Assessing Progress Toward Equality,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32 (2006): 66–77. Eibach, R.P. and Keegan, T. “Free At Last? Social Dominance, Loss Aversion, and White and Black Americans’ Differing Assessments of Racial Progress,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (2006): 453–67. Fletcher, M.A. “Whites think discrimination against whites is a bigger problem than bias against blacks,” Washington Post, October 8, 2014; online: https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/08/white-people-think-racial-discrimination-inamerica-is-basically-over/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9b09d60ecf17; (accessed November, 20, 2014.) Hale, J. Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Style. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.) Henry, P.J. and Sears, D. “The Symbolic Racism,” Political Psychology 23 (2002): 253–83. Kahneman, D. and A. Tversky, eds. Conflict Resolution: A Cognitive Perspective. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.) Kleugel, J.R. and Smith, E.R. Beliefs About Inequality: Americans’ Views of What Is and What Ought to Be. (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1986.) Lonergan, B. “The Subject,” in A Second Collection ed. William F.J. Ryan and Bernard Tyrell, 69–86. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974.) ——. “Panton Anakephalaiosis,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 91 (1991): 134–72. ——. Method in Theology. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.) Lowery, B.S., Knowles, E.D., and Unzueta, M.M. “Framing Inequity Safely: Whites’ Motivated Perceptions of Racial Privilege,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33 (2007): 1237–50. Norton, M.I. and Sommers, S.R. “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 63 (2011): 215–18. Norton, M.I., Sommers, S.R., Apfelbaum, E.P., Pura, N., and Ariely, D. “Color Blindness and Interracial Interaction: Playing the Political Correctness Game,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 949–53. Pettigrew, T.F. How to Think Like a Social Scientist. (New York: HarperCollins, 1996.) Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L.M., and Malle, B.F. “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 741–63.

12

Theological Considerations of Being Human while Black Antonia Michelle Daymond

Introduction The anthropological status of the black subject, whose existence has historically been under the threat of erasure, in relation to the Western bourgeois construction of the world, is a perennial open wound for Christian theology. More specifically, that the black subject’s humanity has often been disparaged in the modern West, her relation to Western Christian anthropology, which relies on the imago dei to give meaning, value, and redemption to humanity, plagues theological discourse and method much in the same way it plagues the cosmos. In the Christian quest for understanding finite humanity’s unique capacity for communion with an infinite God within the context of the political project of the Western modern world, a flawed yet flawless human subject became fashioned that was suitable to the West’s imperial and colonial logics. Consequently, Christianity hinged upon the questionable genocidal conditions of intellectual production that invented enlightenment Man-as-human,1 whose configuration was maintained and overrepresented within hierarchical systems of power.2 This resulted in devastating infringements of domination, exploitation, and violence by which black people became tethered within the precincts of, to use Lewis Gordon’s terminology, an anti-black world in which hegemonic epistemologies stemming from the Judeo-Christian West have conceptualized the human or “Man”3 or “Woman” as white, supremacist, sovereign, propertied, and heteropatriarchal. Such thinking has resulted in a radical alterity which negated black humanity and “blackness” as: 1) non-human or subhuman; 2) inferior due to nature or social condition; and 3) antithetical to (white) normative gender and sexuality. The assemblage of theologians grounding black subjectivity in their work seek to disrupt human hierarchies of power that undergird the project of Western modernity and seek to arrest, uncover, and ultimately dislodge the West’s epistemic constitution of “Man.” Their interventions not only call into question and unsettle Western modernity’s hegemonic knowledge systems and philosophy of knowledge but also interrogate the representation of the human by considering the mosaic provenances of black political, social, and cultural life. Modern Western theology comfortably leaves out the black

152

Handbook of African American Theology

subject as well as the violence, subjection, and racialization adhered to her; African American theology, however, intentionally attends to the black subject instead of relegating her to the margins. That their discourses are situated within a discipline that continues to maneuver within the West’s distorting sensibilities and its rampant ideological and cultural codes by which the black subject generally carries little significance, these theological engagements have disrupted orthodox worldviews, constructing theological projects that render the black subject free from oppressive conditions in its material and spiritual forms. However, more recently, in the United States, the discourse not only seeks to understand black life/experience through racial oppression/suffering and liberation, but also considers that contemporary black life is fluid and composed of cultural differences, contains complex and contested subjectivities, endures the negative impact of empire and acknowledges the need to center black bodies and the manifold power structures levied onto them in African American theological inquiry of being human. My task here is to not only to rehearse these developments (the works presented here are by no means exhaustive) but to signal a basic paradigm shift emanating from today’s intellectual protocols that govern black theological discourse; that is, in its preoccupations with difference and intersectionality, contemporary scholarly considerations in the discipline have sought to go beyond associating the notion of God with “blackness”—a concept baked into lexicons of resistance and survival—in the service of providing alternative ways to understand the place of race and racialization of being human. This essay is divided into three sections. First, I begin by problematizing the standard Christian conception of the imago dei, which has tended to describe the relation between God and the human person in more universal and abstract terms, and how this notion became impotent if/when applied to the particularity of the black subject. Along with this, I will briefly discuss the ways the imago dei helped to support grand significations of white universality and European difference via particular epistemological underpinnings, which, along with scientific theories of race, heavily influenced social arrangements in the United States. Second, I turn to the work of James Hal Cone, arguably one of the discipline’s most influential representatives, in order to discuss the ways that “black experience” and “blackness” in association with Christian liberation narratives served as identifying markers for the black subject especially evidenced in early black liberation theology. However, a few examples are given below showing how these concepts became problematized and deconstructed throughout the development of African American theology in an attempt to go beyond fixed racial logics and agency in order to uncover the complexities of black life, the ways black persons, like other racial groups, are composed of a collection of groups marked by differences such as gender, sexual orientation, profession, skin color, religious affiliation, ethnicity, class, and so on.4 Further, these discourses have sought to uncover the ways black folks live and should live so that they are not solely defined by “race.” Finally, I conclude by suggesting that future theological offerings that seek to express being human while “black” should consider or maintain situating humanity within the culture of anti-blackness, in so far as black human subjection (in its variant forms) continues to pollute the production of knowledge

Being Human while Black

153

about humanity and the social.5 I maintain that despite the differences in black subjectivity as well as the vague social progress made in postmodernity, there, perhaps, still remains a unitary essence in black humanity, which continues to dismantle a violent past that is inextricably interwoven into the present and will continue to structure our postmodern world well into the future.

Imago dei: for whom? The themes of classical Christian anthropology have been that human beings are created in the image of God, subsequently fall into sin but are capable of being redeemed through the incarnational act of God becoming flesh through Jesus Christ who subsequently dies and is resurrected to restore the God/human relationship. Through God’s salvific act, humans, although fallen, are allowed exceptional status in creation in which the broken relationship is restored and humans work towards salvaging the imago dei by progressively drawing nearer to Christ. These themes catalyzed ideological claims about the nature of God as well as the nature of humanity, which facilitated problematic implications for how humans related to one another within the cosmos. To begin, early Christian theology has traditionally based its depictions about the creation–fall–redemption narrative on a master/slave model that positions the creator, namely God, as Master, and creation, namely humans, as slaves due to their sin and fallen nature. Jesus, as God, becomes a slave in order to transpose creation to its appropriate position as subservient to the creator; thus God as creator is reinstated as master.6 A dilemma surfaces in that fallen humanity attempted to function in the role of master, which animated a desire for domination, sovereignty, and rule over others.7 In other words, it solidified human dispositional categories that enabled some to issue commands and others to obey them, creating an established order of malpractice which quickly became installed into the sociopolitical realm.8 Moreover, since the imago dei prototypically defines humanity as bearing some likeness to the divine and if God is viewed as master and humans are like God, then humans can also identify themselves as masters. Therefore, the conflation of God as master, a term that the figure “Man” felt entitled to due to the misappropriation of the imago dei, legitimated imperious polities and institutions of brutal power. Further, an even more extreme difficulty persists in Western theology’s desire to define what is universal among humanity through the lens of the imago dei and the ways that its corresponding characterizations funded the Enlightenment enterprise and the emergence of “Man” in modern conceptions of the human person. In its search for the universal, Western theology has been mired by an anthropological dualism that conceptualizes the human as having a “soul” and “body,” which provide capacities for the human being. However, the discipline has tended to privilege the soul over the body, marking the soul as “rational” making reason superior over the body. For example, Augustine thought that the rational soul, is more like God when the body operates under the auspices of knowing and willing. The very act of “willing” implies that humans, armed with reason (that is,“knowing”), are endowed with the freedom to self-legislate. Hannah Arendt describes Augustine’s

154

Handbook of African American Theology

notion of willing as “a mere auxiliary executive organ for whatever either desire or reason has proposed.”9 Indeed, human freedom is central to the Christian message. However, this human capacity to will freely would ineluctibly lead to the subjugation of those that weren’t considered as human, a deformed freedom that did not align with a specific subjectivity, a black subjectivity that did not uphold the standards of universal “Man.” In other words, the notion of “freedom” would become misused in systems of violent political sovereignty that divested freedom of its theological import, adorning it with a philosophy more politically expedient, namely, liberalism. From John Locke’s “free” civil society, that professed “life, liberty and property” only for those with natural, inheritable rights to white privilege to Thomas Jefferson’s endorsement of this same Lockean ideology in America’s founding documents for all its citizens—with the exception of indigenous peoples or black folk, as he imaged them as inferior or even subhuman— the human will of “freedom” transmogrified into spectral racial division and an autonomous individualism, which suffused every fiber of American democracy. Ultimately, the classical Christian proposition that what defines the human is the soul rather than the body and the certainty that reason in its autonomy could be used to define the essence of the human influenced the tragic framing of the human in the Enlightenment period and thereafter.10 More specifically, the facade of reason became a cultural instrument of racial identity, terror, and exclusion. This so-called human capacity and the system of knowledge that revered it guided the enunciation/writing of the human, composed of imperial epistemologies that fortified an imposing universality of the human as well as a “space of Otherness” designated for those who were classified as “half-human” and “non-human,”11 what Frantz Fanon calls les damnés de la terre, or “the wretched of the earth,” which are those colonized in empire. Les damnés are the anthropos disciplined by the humanitas, as humanitas is conceptualized by those who can rationally envisage themselves as human.12 The superiority of human rationality, however, has been called into question by postmodern theorists, such as, for example, Michel Foucault, who suggests that the human experience is not guided by the empire of reason but by predominant societal codes dispensed through culture and ideology, which affects the success and survival of humanity.13 Historically, race has served as a socially inscribed code, construct, and ideological mechanism that intrinsically orders human life, identities and imaginations. It is what Willie Jennings describes as the process of racial becoming, which involves making oneself.14 As race has assisted humans in conjuring individual identity, it has also allowed humans to forge communities of belonging composed of subjective stratification, which polices who can or cannot access each community. Historically, however, by way of idolatrous colonial power, there exists a supremacist authority that names, orders, and controls this too-often blood-soaked process of social segregation, which is held by those who carry the traits of “Man” ordaining them to define the “other” based on their racist, binary presuppositions. We can define this as two distinct classifications: whites and those labeled as “other.” On one hand, non-Western others are determined as raced or “colored.” On the other hand, whites are assumed as raceless or “colorless” to which epistemological categories remain transparent.15 The ability to reason, as well as the attributes of

Being Human while Black

155

freedom, civilization, and beauty, were attached to white Europeans who were identified as universal and raceless, that is, “human,” which violently denies other, concomitant modes of being human. The rationality behind the exclusion of blacks is that blackness is essentially an abnormality or fall, a nemesis of sorts bearing souls without sentience or sapience, so that black people’s claim to human entitlement was declared illegitimate.16 Black bodies were presented as a raw material to be consumed and disciplined. Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment’s intellectual superhero, wrote that blacks “can be educated but only as servants (slaves), that is, they allow themselves to be trained. . . . To beat ‘the Negro’ efficiently therefore requires a cane but it has to be a split one, so that the cane will cause wounds large enough that prevent suppuration underneath the ‘Negro’s’ thick skin.”17 Such racist reasoning supported institutional and social arrangements that produced “regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized ‘human’ difference”18 bolstered by the intellectual architecture of Eurocentric Christian theology, secular philosophy and the sciences.19 The first generation of colonizers carried such European racist ideology to the New World which resulted in an American Holocaust that involved expelling the aboriginal proprietors of the newfound territory, through conquest, colonization, genocide and theft and the forced import of Africans, consequently igniting significant racial constructions of the human.20 African slaves arrived on the shores of hijacked land with the racial classification “black,” a process so violent that it caused gender to evaporate.21 Cultural identifying aliases were used such as property, cargo, the listing number, a problem, jezebel, criminal, animal, source of disorder, babymaker, demon, menace-to-society, savage, boy, gal, and so on. Black folk were thus named as subhuman or nonhuman. The general construction of race, then, and the projection of blackness as a polluted element in particular, led to viciously inaugurated race/gender sovereignties from the Middle Passage to American slaveocracy, Jim/Jane Crow through to the present Trump regime. Over time, blackness became part of the Western social system, and although the subjection of the black body has funded modern knowledge, blackness nevertheless became cynically recognized in its exclusion from Western modernity, which, ironically, needed to include it.22

The liberating truth of “blackness”? Any discourse on theology, especially as it pertains to the stunning existential crisis of black humanity as well as the ways that blackness has been globally and culturally seized upon and defined by racist epistemological scripts, necessarily involves sustained reflection on the black human subject in relation to God. As it pertains to African American theological treatises, they, although varied and eclectic, organically engage anthropological concerns relating to God talk because it is unreasonable to quarantine any doctrinal issue apart from some grappling of the human person especially when considering the historical struggles of black persons in the United States. We can trace this theological posturing in the tradition’s archive beginning with its earlier attempts that not only sought to contest the captivity of Western Christian philosophical and

156

Handbook of African American Theology

theological reflection but also emphasized the truth of blackness and revealed true freedom and liberation, namely, through identifying the black experience with Jesus Christ. Thus, the primary essence of Jesus does not function as an “instrument of oppression”23 but as a liberator who is present and active in the black experience. This notable distinction of Jesus is uplifted in the landmark statement adopted by the National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC) on June 13, 1969 at their annual convocation in Oakland, California, which includes themes that would constitute the canon of “black liberation theology” especially in its earlier stages: Black Theology is a theology of black liberation. . . . Black Theology is a theology of “blackness.” It is the affirmation of black humanity that emancipates black people from white racism, thus providing authentic freedom for both white and black people. . . . The message of liberation is the revelation of God as revealed in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Freedom IS the gospel. Jesus is the liberator!24

This statement underscores the theme of liberation as well as the liberating work of Jesus Christ as essential to understanding how the gospel of Christianity affirms the full humanity of the black subject as free from the obstructive insecurities of whiteness. James Cone, often crowned as the “father” of black liberation theology,25 would go on to develop these primary tenets through a hermeneutical approach that merges the biblical theme of liberation constituted in the Exodus narrative, as well as in the life and message of Jesus Christ, with the contemporary situation of African Americans in the United States through a method of correlation which relates the corpus of Christianity to human experience. From Cone’s first project Black Theology and Black Power (1969) to his final work The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011), his conception of the black experience and blackness—the core symbol of black theology— conjoined with an appeal to human freedom and liberation plays an integrative role in cementing the concrete characteristics of what it means to be human in his theological framework. What James Cone brings to the table are the ways that he reads blackness and how he positions the black subject in the center of his method, contending that “the weakness of most ‘Christian’ approaches to anthropology stems from a preoccupation with (and distortion of) the God-problem, leaving concrete, oppressed human beings unrecognized and degraded.”26 As such, Cone places the black experience and the collectivity of “blackness” itself in dialectical relation to the Bible, and it is here that we can uncover his identity politics through the ways that he attaches the binary categories of freedom and oppression (which are mediated by contexts of oppression, suffering, rebellion, survival, and resistance) to African American humanity. In this vein, Cone begins with the experiences of the oppressed, especially the oppression of black people, which he sees as imbued with a “life of humiliation and suffering”27: “the black experience is what blacks feel when they try to carve out an existence in a dehumanized white society.”28 Drawing upon his description of the black experience as well as sources from black history and black culture, Cone constructs “blackness” as a condition. For

Being Human while Black

157

Cone, the existential reality of being black in a white world is to live an absurd condition, noting: The black man does not view himself as absurd; he views himself as human. But as he meets the white world and its values he is confronted with an almighty No and is defined as a thing. This produces the absurdity.29

It is through this view of the black human condition, Cone puts forward a robust Christological theological anthropology: “God in Jesus meets us in the situation of our oppressed condition and tells us not only who God is and what God is doing in our liberation. . . . If blacks can take Christology seriously, then it follows that the meaning of our anthropology is also found in and through our oppressed condition, as we do what we have to about the presence of white racism.”30 However, rather than reducing black existence to the sole status of oppression, Cone contends that through Jesus Christ, whom he affirms as the “Black Christ”31 whom God gifts to humanity, the black subject is thus granted the divine gift of freedom. As Dwight Hopkins suggests for Cone, the human person is endowed with freedom because the fundamental content of Jesus’s gospel is liberation,” which continues to operate in the present.32 Cone’s hermeneutical approach, however, does not escape fragility. The groundbreaking advent of the womanist project exposed the masculine hegemony of black theology in critiquing the ways that Cone’s idea of race vastly underestimated the ways that black maleness became normative for “blackness.”33 As the early circle of black theologians relied upon texts written for men and by men, and most importantly the ultimate text, the Bible, the early black theological project, an exclusive club of black men, could not help but reproduce the very patriarchy that undermined black people’s “liberation” in the first place. This is to say that, despite their noble intentions, these theologians (as well as white feminists who failed to consider the obstruction of race in their paradigms as well as their participation, privilege, and complicity within the white-supremacist-historical archive) were not critical of the ways race and gender (i.e. patriarchy) cosigned on the oppression of black humanity making the experiences of women illegible. Hence, womanist projects have prolifically made the tragic, complex, and wondrous experiences of black women and their bodies as their starting point, which is supported by black literature, black women’s experience, and history, as well as women’s roles in the Bible, where we find a God who strengthens and empowers black women in myriad ways. The promise of womanist thought is an inclusive vision for reinscribing black women’s consciousness and experience beyond the dominant enclosure of “blackness” unpacking how particular human subjects are consistently homogenized, depoliticized, and androcized. However, the liberative frameworks found in womanist theology, specifically projects in the dawn of the discipline, along with Cone’s project, have been charged with putting forward narrow, fixed black subjects steeped in the tenets of racial essentialism that penetrate changing historical configurations that emerge through time and space. In other words, the identity politics in these projects (that is, their investments in associating the black experience) stations the raced subject as apprehended and objective from contingent historical/cultural dynamics and subjective modes. Victor

158

Handbook of African American Theology

Anderson remarkably and forcefully reads Cone’s theology and other historical and contemporary black cultural and religious scholars as handcuffed by “ontological” blackness which pertains to a concretized, racial essentialism in which race is “reified— i.e. treated as if it objectively exists independent of historically contingent factors and subjective intentions . . .”34 Anderson conceives ontological blackness as the means by which race is hypostatized; therefore, it generates a representational “racial consciousness” construing the black experience as a totalizing shared experience of black life. Ultimately, for Anderson, Cone’s theological analysis presents a peremptory black subject shrouded with a condition that is circumscribed by the forbidding realities of white racism. Anderson critiques this understanding of blackness because it disregards the diversity evident within black communities. Thus, “race” in ontological blackness is an ossified symbol that stagnates the identity of African Americans, which, Anderson notes, is a mode of “cultural idolatry.”35 Hence, unpacking the place of race in being human became prominent in future black theological cogitations.

What is the place of race in being human? Shifting configurations Through these interventions, we began to see correctives within the discipline that offers theological prescriptions that moved beyond the liberation paradigm in order to dislodge black subjectivity from the stifling closet of ontology and house it in an open arena that needn’t be one-dimensional but complex, relational, and marked by difference.36 In his latest work (at the time of this writing), Creative Exchange,37 Anderson formulates what he calls a pragmatic theology of African American experience that has a “more-than” approach. This is to say that the African American experience is based on more than the experience of suffering, survival, struggle, and resistance. Anderson relies on Edward Farley’s notion of “deep symbol” in order to understand the intricacies of race in being human.38 Farley’s thesis is that “Words of power, that is, deep and enduring symbols that shape the values of a society and guide the life of faith, morality, and action, are subject to powerful forces of discreditation and even disenchantment.”39 According to Farley, deep symbols are historical and arise within and express the historical determinacy of a community. The community’s particular character, tradition, and situation are the locus of deep symbols. This means that deep symbols are historical, and hence relative, to a particular community, and thus are changeable. They can rise and empower, and they can lose their power and disappear.40

Although race is not a contender for Farley’s idea of a “deep symbol,” Anderson views race as a deep symbol due to the “embodied relations signified by race so that recognition arises not only of semblances but also of differences among human beings encountered in the interhuman relation.”41 To be sure, Anderson seeks to reveal race as a penetrating force while disclosing the ambiguities of its symbolic nature. Importantly, he aims to free the symbol from

Being Human while Black

159

essentialist affinities as crystallized in black philosophy and black theology and construct its possibilities within the creative exchange of African tradition and African religious resources. In so doing, Anderson examines two different black philosophical genres through the works of Lucius Outlaw and Anthony Appiah. On one hand, Outlaw views race as that which is experienced socially and culturally and from this encourages black philosophy to unpack the meaning of black experience. Appiah, on the other hand, problematizes the status of “race” in society by arguing that race lacks any legitimate biological basis; hence, it is important to balance racial unity with the recognition of diverse individual identities.42 Anderson considers these two perspectives and finds race to be formidable in its relational capacity but remains unsettled as humans manage various entities of their lives. And, in so doing, he attempts to navigate race beyond rigid dichotomies, yielding it as a relational symbol, which suggests a movement away from an investment in racial identity as a means to promote fixed ideologies. Hence, he sees blackness as a “social sign . . . that is as arbitrary a sign as is any other linguistic convention by which persons negotiate their environment.”43 Thus, the construction of African American religious experience must be characterized by multiple experiences of openness, connectedness, porosity, and irreducibility. Theologians concerned with racial essentialism inundating “blackness” and “black experience” within black theology as highlighted by Anderson have offered other correctives by concentrating on the body for doing theology. Anthony B. Pinn, for example, agrees with Anderson’s conception of the dangers of ontological blackness contending that his own theological anthropology does not suggest “a crude antiessentialism that denies the impact of blackness on African Americans. This impact is, to the contrary, recognition of blackness but as only one of the many factors affecting the subjectivity in the context of the United States.”44 Pinn makes room for understanding African American life as montaged in that it should be understood “as representing both difference and sameness in creative tension.”45 However, his primary concern is to make sure that the complexities of the lived dimensions of black life are not foreclosed due to essentialist, ontological presuppositions of what it means to be black. With this is mind, Pinn argues that the form and content of black theology lack critical precision regarding the body. This is to say that for Pinn the liberation schemes offered within black and womanist theologies are without a subject.46 They are, in a sense, theologies of “no-body”47 or theologies that are consumed by mere abstract representation, with “little attention to the body as material . . . the ‘stuff ’ of human beings.”48 For Pinn, such material-less theologies are fraught with numerous problems, one among them that I’d like to highlight, which is his contention on the ways they distort “the manner in which issues such as racism are measured, and progress against oppression are marked.” Pinn goes on to stress that without attention to the physical, racism becomes a phantom reality; and like phantom limbs it is felt and serves as a source of pain and stimulation difficult to address. One is left with the sensation that racism is always present and impacting life in a reified manner, even when there are signs of shifting importance. Tied to

160

Handbook of African American Theology

this perception of racism as fixed, a reality not dependent on observation, is the sense that blackness easily becomes “over present”—a concern that overshadows or shapes perception of all other concerns.49

Hence, taking a humanistic approach, Pinn’s theological framework grounds the body as marked by difference and fluidity, examining categories that go beyond race—such as gender and sexuality. Although the body materially and discursively serves as a channel for “the arrangement and display of power” it yet possesses agency evident in the many ways the body moves through art, music, popular culture and cultural productions, and diverse religious experience, that is, beyond the narrow confines of Christian constructs. While Pinn’s approach grounds the body through the lens of humanism and religious pluralism, in Enfleshing Freedom, M. Shawn Copeland, by contrast, shows the possibility of centering the body, especially black women’s bodies, within Christian inquiry and reflection through a method of correlation—bringing to the fore the issues of race, sex and gender, sexuality and culture.50 Taking black women and black women’s bodies as her starting point, Copeland opens up lines of inquiry for thinking through the problem of the human, while exploring the ways the divine is revealed and mediated through the body. In so doing, Copeland admirably grapples with the fatalities of chattel slavery through a process of remembering illumining the ways that the corrupted institution betrayed the imago dei by sequestering the black subject outside her rightful entitlement to Christian anthropological claims, which designate humans as unique, imaged like God, and relational/communal creatures with others. Since black women were marked by ideologies of race, sex and gender, sexuality and culture as well as subjected to being objects of property, production, and multiple forms of extreme violence, it is through seriously investigating the marks of black women’s bodies, as well as their unwavering insistence on enfleshing freedom for themselves and others exhibiting the best of humanity, as the new anthropological subject over and against “Man” in relation to the body marks of Jesus of Nazareth—whose body was undermined by the Roman empire— that we can begin to retrieve and restore the imago dei for all. And, in doing so, Copeland provides vital analytical rubrics for underscoring and highlighting the ways that Jesus as the word made flesh, whose own crucified body was raced, gendered, sexed and regulated in empire—critiqued and resisted empire and lived in his body.51 While Copeland’s theological anthropology attends to the concrete experiences of black women as the subject of her theological reflection on being human, she does not make black women’s subjectivity exclusive in her theological framework evidenced in her move to turn to other subjects of difference in her method. According to Copeland, the tragic subjugation of black humanity to “demonized difference” in the fifteenth century entangled all human bodies in a web of “body commerce, body exchange, and body value.” Thus, she contends, “Taking the black woman’s body as the starting point for theological anthropology allows us to interrogate the impact of that demonization in history, religion, culture and society.”52 Copeland, then, positions exploited, poor, despised black women as well as black victims of history as significant imports in her theological anthropology since “their suffering, like the suffering of Jesus, seeds a new life and future for all humanity.”53 Since imperial contexts still exist in present society

Being Human while Black

161

and since the “flesh of the crucified and resurrected Jesus is extended through time and space,” Copeland contends that theological anthropology must place new marked bodies at the center, that is, “to turn to ‘other’ subjects”54 ensnared in the new imperial order in the service of forging a new solidarity. Thus, Copeland’s process of making visible the stinging memory of black women’s bodily subjection extends to the present bringing into focus other subjects besides black women whose bodies and embodiment are relegated and hushed in the margins of history in relation to global and systemic dimensions of racialized, gendered, sexualized, and imperialized subjugation. Thus, Copeland’s understanding of being human dedicates much effort to include homosexual embodiment, without linking/intersecting racial experiences to their bodies per se, as these bodies, for her, endure “particularly intense opprobrium” in empire.55 White feminist theologian Karen Teel engages Copeland’s analysis in this way: Why in a book focused around black women’s bodies, does Copeland turn to gay and lesbian bodies without highlighting the experiences of black lesbians? Perhaps because no one is seriously arguing that black bodies cannot image God, while many Christian churches teach that homosexual bodies contravene God’s will.56

Hence, although race is an ultimate concern in Copeland’s anthropology, she goes beyond it by turning towards other subjects of difference in her clarion call for solidarity. There are on the horizon more accounts in black theological production that seek to move our understanding of being human beyond racial logics and racialization through Christological accounts that extend the humanity of Jesus beyond rigid racial/ colonial binaries, which implies that humans, who, imaged like God, must too go beyond the impasse of racialization in understanding human identity and fulfillment. Before I conclude, I’d like to briefly highlight the work of Brian Bantum who represents such an account. Bantum puts forward an incarnational embodied theology that makes explicit the body as beautifully patented with difference while underscoring her malleability and freedom. In doing so, Bantum refers to Christian doctrine, such as the imago dei and the incarnation, to explain that humanity, through the redemptive body of Jesus incarnate, is free from the stronghold of race. On one hand, Bantum seeks to take the inexorable process of racial formation in human identity seriously by bringing attention to the ways that race has tragically delimited bodies of difference, which is an inescapable characteristic applicable to all of humanity. On the other hand, the core of Bantum’s work seeks to show that, through Christ, the stronghold of race does not yoke the human body. Rather, it is through Christ our bodies are freed and transformed anew. In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum develops the Chalcedonian notion, which defines the mixed nature of Jesus as fully human and fully divine. From this, Bantum argues that Jesus is a mixture of both, which makes him a tragic mulatto. Therefore, Bantum renders Jesus not as opaque or pinned by color in solidarity with a particular racial or collective identity, nor is Jesus transcendent or bodiless—a figure that is detached from culture. Rather, Jesus as mixed represents, for Bantum, the primal scene of our hybrid

162

Handbook of African American Theology

society: plural, malleable, unstable, and mutable. Since our world is constantly evolving with dynamically variegated racial and ethnicity demographics, we can understand that the world is, in a sense, mulatto. Therefore, human persons must enter into the unrestricted space where Christ dwells in betwixt the “neither/nor” unbound by the world’s taxonomic structural categories: “our imitation of Christ is located not to our likeness in essence, but our entrance into this neither/nor.”57 Therefore, Christ as mulatto provides to humanity solidarity and salvation. Bantum would go on to unpack the differentiated nature of the human/Christ embodiment in his latest work and memoir, Death of Race. Bantum contends that race and its flagrant regimes of power extinguish human capacity, potential, and particularity—disfiguring the entirety of what it means to be human. In other words, race produces death. For Bantum, however, all humans have stories with plots thickened by race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality difference, which are aligned with the story of the incarnate Christ who took upon himself human particularity. Hence, Bantum declares: “My body is not a race. I have a story that is more than race, even if race is an indelible part of my walk in this world.”58 Here, we can hear echoes of Anderson’s “more than” approach discussed earlier, to which Bantum answers that, despite the indestructible structure of race, humans are more than society’s racial dynamics. To support his point, Bantum traces stories of difference within biblical narrative and Christian doctrine. From the story of difference in the creation story where we find God, flesh and spirit, male and female, commingling in difference to the transfigured body of Christ who is, for Bantum, immersed with profound difference, these stories offer us a salvific promise that defeats every notion that seeks to confine our very being. Ultimately, Bantum contends that it is through the embodied difference of Christ we find freedom.

Conclusion: being human while black From Cone’s conception of “blackness” and “black Christ” to Bantum’s “neither/nor” and “mulatto Jesus/embodied Christ,” we find an evident shift on the placement of race, the conception of blackness, the consideration of racial, gender, sexual, and cultural difference in relation to power, and descriptions of radical particularity within black life and black culture in African American theological anthropology. More specifically, through worry about harvesting ontological absolutes, within the current state of the discipline we find regressions of the symbol of “blackness” as the symbol risks foreclosing on issues pertaining to gender, class, sexuality, and even religious/ theological beliefs; and progressions of difference, relationality and inclusivity, which signal a foremost expansion in African American theology on understanding the ways by which black persons in the US, who’ve endured the violent journey from property to personage, see themselves in relation to power, which is accompanied by the heterogeneous facets of religious preferences, social locations, cultural beliefs, political ideologies, and secular worldviews. As our humanity is always already accompanied by supremacist systems of power that seek to contain, control, and extinguish our bodies, there are nevertheless differences in black subjectivity as well as what shapes these

Being Human while Black

163

differences, how they transpire and how they continue to be re-created—which have prompted the need to think complexly about being human while “black” in relation to God and the world. While all theological propositions I’ve briefly discussed offer life-affirming and inspiring conceptions of the human, there are important considerations that we should think about. We must ask if the emphasis on difference can unwillingly replicate, reify, or create an ideology of “indifference” that disarticulates and transmogrifies the specific ways that the subjection of the black body—whose space, time and being remain undercut by structural violence inaugurated by racial slavery—remains integral in funding knowledge production concerning the human and the social frame. What’s at stake is that in attempting to theologically imagine and construct alternate ways of being in the world beyond the gape of race we must always consider the deathly valley of what Frantz Fanon calls a “white inscripted world”59 that is “antiblack in nature.”60 What I’m thinking about is not how black people inhabit or perform identity and difference but the structural placement of anti-blackness that still stations black life as well as the need to measure the ways that the structural opposition of anti-blackness informs the manifold formations of power and difference such as, for example, race, gender, sex, class, empire, and nation.61 In other words, we must be careful to not let concepts such as “relationality,” “difference,” and “particularity” maneuver as allencompassing truths that superintend the structural dynamics of power that perpetually submerge black subjects to the realm of otherness or Western modernity’s “non-human.” Even when it comes to terms like “solidarity” and “inclusion,” terms that have fashionably erupted in present social movements, black people tend to diminish in political projects advocating for equality, access, or change, as enunciations about black suffering tend to be rendered counterfeit or dis-remembered unless black people can align black suffering with the suffering of others as if racial hierarchy positions all subjects in the same zone of suffering (e.g. Black lives matter vs. “Blue” lives matter/All Lives Matter; Black feminist/womanist movements vs. white feminist movements). This is why Copeland’s process of “memory” in her theological anthropology is so vital. Moreover, if we relinquish envisioning a unitary, transcendental racial bond62 within black humanity for the sake of illumining the significance of difference/ relationality/particularity in conceptualizing being human, are we yet fully equipped with the tools for a thorough critique necessary to climb beneath and dismantle the intense racial inequities that seek to steal, kill and destroy black life in the present day? This is to say that although spasmodic black progress exists, black humanity nevertheless remains haunted by a deepened reality ever more present in unparalleled black dispossession, poverty, and criminalization and the reoccurring vicious slayings of black female and male bodies sanctioned by the state. “Man” thus remains unimpeachable. Hence, we would do well in continuing to theologize black existence within both the complexities and pluralities of contemporary black life and the structural antagonism of anti-blackness. And, if there is anti-blackness, perhaps then there is still value in continuing to grapple with the term “blackness.” This is to say that there just might be value in continuing to associate the notion of God with a careful consideration of “blackness” or probing the possibility of a unitary essence within

164

Handbook of African American Theology

black humanity that has compelled black folk to live in wondrous and capacious ways beyond the narrow constructs that have sought to define our image as less than the image of God.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

7 8

Jafari Sinclaire Allen and Ryan Cecil Johnson, “The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology” Current Anthropology 57 no. 2 (2016): 131. Although I draw from Allen and Johnson’s language of intellectual production here, their analysis is within the wider project of Western anthropology; however, my focus is on Western “Christian” anthropology. Ibid. See also Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 1998. My understanding of the concept of “Man” comes from the groundbreaking work of Sylvia Wynter. See Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (1993): 257–337. As the significant work of race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw has shown, each identifiable black group is confronted with multiple levels of power intersecting on their bodies referred to as “intersectionality.” See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67. This point about the subjection of black humanity and anti-blackness informing epistemology is drawn from P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods’ On Marronage: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2015), 2. Ibram Kendi points out that we can see this schema in the first-century writings of St. Paul, who introduced a tri-level order of master/slave relations—the heavenly master reigns at the top while the earthly master is positioned in the middle and the enslaved resides at the bottom. We can see this structure in Paul’s statements such as: “He who was free when called is a slave of Christ” (1 Cor. 7:22) and “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God form the heart”(Eph. 6: 5-6). In Galatians 3:28, Kendi highlights that St. Paul makes a critical caveat in equalizing the souls of masters and slaves as “all in one in Jesus Christ.” Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2015), 17. On this point, I draw from and am indebted to J. Kameron Carter who discussed the Christian master/slave dialectic in his interview with Mark Labberton on Black Poetics. See https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu/contributor/mark-labberton/ This is also seen in Aristotelian rationalizations of slavery: “Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have a right to command and those who are born to obey.” Christianity began to adopt these arguments to justify Roman slave holding practices. Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Also cited in Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 17.

Being Human while Black 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

165

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, 1981), 214. Arendt goes on to propose that “will” also means “the freedom of choice between two or more desirable objects or ways of conduct” (29). Although Enlightenment science was invented and developed as subservient to religion and revelation. See Frank Wilderson, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963); Walter D. Mignolo, “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean To Be Human” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 108. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xxiii. Willie James Jennings, “The Traditions of Race Men,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 614. On this point, I am drawing from Charles H. Long’s, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986). Nahum Chandler, “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought,” Criticism 50, no. 3 (2008): 355–6. Cited in Immanuel Eze’s “ ‘Race’: Kant’s Anthropology,” in Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. Katherine M. Faull (London: Institute for Humane Studies, 1995), 236. Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 11. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assenblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. In regard to the sciences, Darwin’s highly influential theory of evolution in the nineteenth century specifically stands out. Although Darwin is documented as being anti-slavery, the terms that he used, such as “civilized races,” “lower races,” “savage races of man,” and “half-civilized man,” overshadowed his general thesis that humans were constantly evolving and spreading towards extinction or perfection. Moreover, his scientific theory that “civilized races have extended, and are now everywhere extending, their range, so as to take the place of the lower races” aided and abetted racist logics and myths in the social and political stratosphere. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol.1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 169. See Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 19. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987). David Marriott, “Judging Fanon,” Rhimezones: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29 (2016): 2. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1949), 29. See “Black Theology: Statement by the National Committee of Black Churchmen,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History 1966–1979, 101. Dwight N. Hopkins, “General Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology, eds. Dwight Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 14; cf. also Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1072), 216; Rufus Burrow, James Cone and

166

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37

Handbook of African American Theology Black Liberation Theology (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994), 1; Caryle F. Stewart, “The Method of Correlation in the Theology of James Cone,” Journal of Religious Thought 40, no. 2 (1984): 27. Reflecting on Michel Foucault’s writings about Discourse/ Knowledge/Power, I agree with Foucault that discourse joins power and knowledge. Casting James Cone as the “father” of any academic project that aims to be liberating is a contradiction in terms because of what the term “father” signifies in an imperial context: property, wealthy, patriarch, masculine, and ultimate authority, just to name a few. I recognize that this is likely more a casual than serious intent and yet this is precisely Foucault’s point: truth, morality, and meaning are created through discourse. Therefore, until the recent two decades, the very “meaning” of black theology has proceeded as if the very definition of blackness could only be manifest through the lens of patriarchy. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 82. Ibid., 23. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 28. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 11. Ibid., 85. James Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), 109. Dwight Hopkins, Being Human: Race, Culture and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 36. For more on womanist scholarship see Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books Press, 1993); Katie Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books Press, 1993); Diana L. Hayes, And Still We Rise: An Introduction to Black Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1996); and more recent scholarship of Kelly Brown Douglas, Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Eboni Marshall Turman, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books Press, 2015). Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995), 11. Ibid., 15, 37–8. On this point, I am drawing from Victor Anderson’s “We See through a Glass Darkly? Black Narrative Theology and the Opacity of African American Religious Thought?” in The Ties That Bind: African American and Hispanic American/Latino/a Theologies in Dialogue, eds. Anthony B. Pinn and Benjamin Valentin (New York: Continuum, 2001). See also Anderson’s Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008). Victor Anderson, Creative Exchange. Anderson acknowledges that he may have overstated his criticism against black liberation theology for the sake of articulating forms of difference, that is, the grand differential nature of black identity. Further, he acknowledges recent efforts among black and womanist theologians who began to move beyond essentialist ideas of black experience. However, Anderson remains suspicious of the persistent desire of said theologians to continue to foreground the

Being Human while Black

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62

167

black experience on the categorical experiences of suffering, humiliation, survival, struggle, and resistance. Edward Farley, Deep Symbols: Their Postmodern Effacement and Reclamation (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996). Ibid., 1. Anderson, Creative Exchange, 30. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 34–42. Ibid., 42. Anthony B. Pinn, Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Political Thought (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 50. Ibid., 51. Ibid., xv. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Pinn also makes note of the difference between the contexts to which their theological anthropologies are grounded. lbid., xvii. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 53. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 74. Karen Teel, Racism and the Image of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 125. Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 107. Also Bantum, Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 174. Bantum, Death of Race, 2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986 [1952]). Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (New York: Humanity Books, 1994). On this point, I am heavily indebted to the theoretical lens of Afro-pessimism, which is undergirded by black feminist thought. I am especially appreciative of Frank Wilderson’s meticulous analysis on the “structure of U.S. antagonisms” in Red, Black and White: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). I borrowed the phrasing “transcendental racial bond” from Alexander G. Weheliye in his Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assenblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 31.

13

Pneumatology and Contemporary Theological Discourse William C. Turner

Introduction Theological discourse in the Western church has tended to focus on the idea of God or the incarnation of the Son in Jesus of Nazareth. A consequence has been a wedding between theology and philosophy that is so close that sometimes one scarcely can tell the difference, or a stress on Christology that has been called Christomonism by some critics, especially in the Eastern churches. Discourse biased toward logos Christology at the expense of pneumatic Christology easily led to a collapse into what might be called binitarianism in place of fulsome testimony to the living God to which Scripture bears witness and in whose life the church partakes when she is alive.1 There is no life without the Spirit. The Spirit, as Lord and giver of life, gives life in all of creation and gives new life in Christ and life in the church. This life is the gift of God who is spirit.2 Life, vitality, energy, power, experiences of the divine are indelible marks of AfroChristian faith. Indeed, it is knowledge and experience of God that made life livable for Africans on Western shores. Full, rich, abundant life defied the death-traps and hell-holes into which black existence threatened to descend. The faithful felt the Spirit of God in the energizing and empowering work of worship, resistance, and bearing witness to the principalities. This consisted in preaching, praying, singing, shouting, dancing, and manifold forms of deliverance. That same work took intellectual forms that extended into reflection under the nomenclature of Black Theology. A continuing dimension of that work, which offers a worthy challenge in the present, is the fuller development of pneumatology, that is, thinking reflectively and critically on how the Spirit supplies authority for sable and sun-kissed children of God in tomes that are commensurate with the life-giving power of God and the challenges of the day. The discourse of pneumatology is utterly constitutive in the biblical canon—Old and New Testaments—to the extent that shreds would be left if it were to be excised. As George Montague ably shows in his work, one can see testimony upon the pages of scripture to the work and witness of the Spirit from Genesis to Revelation.3 Indeed, it is so thorough and saturating a witness that an eye trained first to focus upon purely

170

Handbook of African American Theology

human activity and experience can miss it. Fastening first upon the human subject or upon questions having to do primarily with material interests could quickly and easily set aside the powerful operations in creation, human communities, and the mission of God that are not resorbed into the forces, designs, and strategies over which the human subject has control. However, the biblical witness is punctuated by life and vitality that is self-originating within God and proceeds from God in the story and mission of God into which human subjects are invited. This chapter argues that pneumatology is implicit in every discourse about God and God’s dealings with the world. This particularly is the case in the discourses of Christology, ecclesiology, and soteriology. The language of salvation and grace could then be said to be like thin membranes over pneumatology. The problem often is that these discourses take on a life of their own when pneumatology is not made explicit. The theologian Donald Gelpi argues, for instance, that a dearth of pneumatology is the chief cause for atheism in the modern West. That is, without attention to the Holy Spirit as a divine person, one scarcely can give an account of the presence, much less the necessity, of God in the conduct of human affairs.4 Interestingly, as modernity comes to the limits of its ability to give a plenary account of the world through history and science, the discourses that critique modern science and classical physics gesture toward a plenary domain in which the human subject is not the center at all. Neither is the stasis predicated on forms of knowledge that posit God as impassible or as an idea bounded by the reach of human reason. Rather, there is what James Loder would call the “Logic of the Spirit,” or, shall we say, the Scripture’s way of speaking of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit from eternity in a manner that cannot be resorbed into human discourse that does not begin with confessing the Lord and Giver who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.5

The significance of African American Christianity and Pentecostalism I recall being asked to teach a course in pneumatology to satisfy a requirement in Black Church Studies. I found that to be a rather easy task. Having been trained in both fields, teaching and doing scholarship in both fields, it seemed to me that this was a natural fit. The problem for many students was that they found themselves taking the course in the last semester of their last year. The problem they encountered was trying to fit these two fields of study back into their theological preparation at the end. As they came to the close of their preparation, they wanted to test their theological muscle and make use of what they had learned. It turned out that this course exposed them to two fields of study with which they had no familiarity. The even more vexing problem was fitting either or both these fields of knowledge into their encyclopedia of knowledge once it had been formed without either. Alas, this is the problem for theology in general. An apt parable for this dilemma is that of attempting to make bread by inserting the leavening agent after the lump has been formed. Whether one uses plain or self-rising flour, the ingredient that makes the dough rise must be inserted from the start. The

Pneumatology

171

same is so whenever one attempts to come to terms with either pneumatology or AfroChristian faith. Neither doing pneumatology, nor comprehending the faith of people who live at home in the world of the Spirit and a world that denies their humanity under God, fits well into a dogmatic narrative or one constructed with that neglect. The intersection between Afro-Christian faith and expressions of the church in quest for deeper experiences of the Spirit gave rise to the major reformation that marked the church of the twentieth century. Other impetus cannot be denied and needs to be examined its own right. However, these various approaches cannot and do not rise above or invalidate the confluences of the Azusa Revival of the early twentieth century and the paradigm that emerged to present itself for reinsertion into the church worldwide. What emerged was a form and substance that begged for the interrogations that pneumatology was uniquely suited to perform as constructive and critical work sorely needed through the church.6

Afro-Christian faith as paradigm The focus here is people who live at home with things of the Spirit. This is where God is known as actively present in the world that vibrates and pulsates with vitality manifest in the rhythms and motions of life. What I am talking about is how this intersection with African American Christianity intersects the larger tradition and expands the range of articulation—namely, how to give a theological account for broad experiences of God—experiences that tend to be banished by Western canons of reason into the realms of primitivity and underdeveloped as third-order discourse.7 No doubt there will continue to be a debate as to whether William Seymour or Charles Parham deserves to be called the “founder” of the modern Pentecostal movement. What scarcely can be disputed is how Seymour threw wide open the door in American Christianity to spiritual practices and spiritual empowerment developed within the nascent African American church and the accent he set on practices that welcomed the koinonia of the Spirit across lines of division. One might say that the revival he led pointed antecedently to the proto-pneumatology that marked black church life and the pneumatology that continued to reside within the black church. Indeed, it is the critical and constructive reflection on the Spirit from within the bowels of the African American church that promises to be the centerpiece and crystallizing element for the uncompleted task of black theology. That is, how the Spirit is creating koinonia, prophetic witness, habits of holiness, liberation and restoration for broken lives, and bearing witness to the principalities.8

Feeling the Spirit We need to acknowledge first of all that pneumatology as a subfield of systematic theology and theology as a scientific discipline are fairly recent in the African American Christian tradition. There is experience of God the Spirit before the reflective productions. This is a sense for the Spirit. But even more, a hunger, a longing, a thirst for the Spirit. The

172

Handbook of African American Theology

Spirit who abides, the Holy Ghost who cannot be taken away. What shall we call it? A sense for the Spirit (a sensus numinis) cultivated in people who knew the world as a topos vibrating with the rhythms of life that interconnected the visible and the invisible. This sense derived from the wisdom and knowledges which were kept alive among the people.9 Indeed, this was the grid of knowledge present among Africans who came to the preaching of the gospel. More, when the Bible was translated into the language of the people, the inner tissue of their reality was necessarily engaged for intelligibility. That is, the world of the Bible and the world of African hearers often held more in common than the world of those who presented themselves as tutors—teachers and preachers. This was especially the case for Europeans whose minds were overlain and interlaced with the epistemologies of science and history emerging from the enlightenment. Traditional African sensibilities were at home in the world of spiritual reality. The issue here is: What is the sense of the Spirit that African peoples brought with them? You can find this content in some of the spirituals. Consider, for instance: “Every time I feel the Spirit moving in my heart I will pray. . . .” Here, the Spirit inspired prayer, both audible and inaudible. Moans, groans, sighs too deep for words. Groans that neither the devil nor the slave-master could comprehend. The Spirit made the soul happy and caused the feet to move. Where dancing was not permitted in the piety of the evangelicals, the Spirit prompted the shout. When those who tutored African believers in the “proper ways of the Lord” sought to forbid shouting and dancing, their response was that the Spirit would not descend without the song and shout. In the words of R.R. Marrett, religion is more danced out than thought out, better felt than telt.10 What I am talking about is people who are at home in the world of spiritual reality. These oblique references were to the Spirit prompting one to pray and prompting the worshipping acts—shouting, dancing, inspired and moving preaching—that were called African exercises. References from the colonial era were to the African part of the family and the Pinkster activities. But then there is reference to “vision travels,” as in Clifton Johnson’s God Struck Me Dead.11 This is not necessarily pneumatology as a subfield of theology as a scientific discipline. Here I use “scientific” in a relative sense. It is not so much an empirical science, but a third-order reflection. However, there is a necessary connection that is needed between careful, precise, reflective language on the one hand, and the testimony, the song, or the experience of hovering over one’s dead body and seeing in a vision the transforming work of God on the other hand. Similarly with healings and casting out of evil spirits, or exorcisms. One must take seriously, even, the resistance of slaves to the preaching, teaching, and directives of slave-masters. This is the resistance that rejected the preaching and teaching of many white preachers and slave-masters. This might be called the exercise of prophetic authority—the Spirit working like a monitor to let the truly converted one know what was and was not of God. Yes, and even the claim of dreams and visions in those who rebelled, like Nat Turner. These were those who heard auditions when receiving direction. Turner, for instance, claimed hearing instruction telling him it was time to “take up the sword and fight the serpent.” He knew the time of his appointment by seeing drops of blood on the ears of corn. What we are dealing with in these moments is sensitivity to the Spirit coming from the biblical witness. It is similar to the accounts of how the Spirit moved upon the

Pneumatology

173

judges and prophets, inspiring zeal that was unquenchable, zeal that enabled contests against the superior force. The operation of the spiritual gift of discernment enabled a judgment as to what was and what was not of God. For example, there was the discernment of Frederick Douglass, a preacher in the AME Zion Church, which enabled him to distinguish between the religion of the slaveholder, which he hated, and the religion of Jesus Christ.12 Then there is the seizing of Old Testament passages, as with William Seymour, who was bold to quote from Isaiah 59:19.13 When the enemy shall rush in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him. There is, further, the explicit pneumatology of the New Testament—especially in Luke, where the anointing of the Spirit prompts the preaching of good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, and liberty to those who are bruised.14 But ah, there is also the connection between the liberty the Spirit brings and the reference to jubilee. This is what enables Christian slaves to argue that they did not belong in the category of heathen bondsmen, to which reference is made, because of being baptized into Christ and made to drink of the Spirit. They were entitled to their jubilee inasmuch as they could not be called heathen.15 In addition, there were the many passages in the New Testament that proclaimed the egalitarian ministry of the Spirit who carried Philip into the chariot to preach to the Ethiopian eunuch. He was baptized and given the joy of the Spirit, signifying Ethiopia stretching forth her hand to God.16 Thus, one can speak of the nascent pneumatology17 that emerged in the African American church even prior to its formal articulations in the preaching of Fisher, Jones, Mason, Fuller, and Haywood in what Leonard Lovett calls the five original Black Holiness-Pentecostal denominations.18 One will search long and hard for the formal full-length treatise on pneumatology qua pneumatology. However, one will find countless testimonies, sermons, pamphlets, Bible lectures, and other teaching on the Spirit—particularly as experienced in Spirit baptism. Speaking of the Spirit apart from experiencing the Spirit was hardly a mode of discourse. This is because of the Spirit’s very nature—to go forth like breath, to inseminate life and vitality, to do the work of regeneration and sanctification. To burn like fire, to refresh like water, to soothe like ointment, to empower in anointing, to inspire preaching, prophecy, and the operation of gifts. To fashion a body of obedience and glory; to inshine and irradiate. Yes, there was the language of being “in self,” and those with discernment would draw the line. But there was nothing unusual about the confession that the Spirit was in the place, or that we had a Holy Ghost time. Put another way, the Spirit was to be experienced more than studied, felt more than “telt,” caught more than taught—wind that blew through the house, fire that set a tongue ablaze. The Spirit was viewed as the intimate friend—the paraclete—who could not be taken from the believer. One whom the Spirit possessed was filled with the fullness of God. Indeed, one could know that Christ abided in them by the Spirit who was given.19

Reformation of Protestant pneumatology One of the ways in which the limitations have been erected within mainstream Protestant theology was by limiting the work of the Spirit to the means of grace—the

174

Handbook of African American Theology

two appointed means being baptism and the Eucharist. One sees a crack in that wall through John Wesley’s notion of prudential means. But then you have these wideranging, broad experiences of God among people who refuse to be banished to categories of mental illness, or hallucination.

Affinity with ancient knowledges The pressure here is on the deep pneumatological troves found among Roman Catholic and Orthodox theologies. With the Orthodox in particular, one is plunged into a theology of the Spirit that knows no other way than to speak of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit. Transitivity, perichoresis, interpenetration, and flow of life is the only way to talk about God.20 Here one finds the vital connection that reaches into the ancient conversation which serves as a counterpoint to Enlightenment discourses which tended to hold mystery at bay. This is discourse rooted first and foremost in the thought world where the ancient definitions were forged. It does not first pass through the filters of Enlightment restrictions on speech with the epistemological boundaries established by it, discourses of empirical verification and literalism. This is like the world of the Bible. First-order experiences, which would include experiences of the Spirit, are welcome. The vital participation and presence of God is the first account, not when all else has failed. Even where other explanations and accounts are not denied, the account which credits God has its place. Or even more, where glory to God and extolling the works of God consist in the plenary account being excised in favor of purely scientific or historical explanations. This epistemological space is not occupied solely by AfroChristians. Rather this segment of the Christian family makes a good representation. To the extent that Afro-Christians are human, their experience of God can serve well as a prism. But more, such representation of the human family can go a long way to counter Western European normativity and signify a theological bias altogether against notions of normativity. Decentering of the world in this way is consistent with the sub-version one finds in Scripture. There one sees God choosing what the world despises. God called daughters and sons from Africa. Ethiopia stretching forth her hand to God is paradigmatic for Christianity that is at home with the Spirit. Surely, this was the focus of the mission in Los Angeles known as the Azusa Miracle, where peoples from the globe assembled, and the Spirit descended, in what was called by many the revisitation of Pentecost. For that brief moment, there was openness to the presence and power of God in a time of great need—to counter wicked and oppressive arrangements of the world, and also to prepare the church for what it needed.

The ruach The masculine pronoun “he” historically has been used when referring to the Spirit as person. But this has to do primarily with the fact that this is the language to which the church has grown accustomed. It is not to fasten onto the masculine gender images. Actually, in the Hebrew the word for Spirit—ruach—is feminine. In the Greek, the

Pneumatology

175

word is pneuma which is neuter. The first exposure we get to the Spirit in the Sacred Writ is in Genesis 1, where the ruach is brooding over the Tehom like a hen hatching an egg. The Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds like breath, as the very life of God. The movements of the Spirit are interior—as with insemination, as in wind, as with the current inside water. The truth of the matter is that whichever gender pronoun I use—whether she or he—I must give the same modification—namely, so that with the Spirit our speech is not already overdetermined with gendered discourse. When we use gendered speech, we probably get greater value from feminine gender images that carry us on what Howard Thurman might call an inward journey. We are looking here at the transitive life in God—how divine persons live in one another. To use the image given in the fourth gospel, it is like the vine and the branch mutually dwelling in one another, and the sap dwelling in them both.21 This interpenetration in divine life modifies what we can and must mean by person. That is, we have taken a position against the modern notion of the “individual” as hermetically sealed—individual as metaphysical fiction. We do not know of human life that has no antecedent. What I am talking about is the ancient meaning of person. This is “hypostasis” that has substance, but also the transitive property of living inside another. This is what we have with the Spirit, and with all divine persons.22 With the Spirit, we have God. Indeed, it utterly is consistent to speak of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, where the fullness of God is in each divine person. This is to be contrasted with “modalism,” or even with “monarchy”—where the Son and the Spirit do not exist simultaneously, are lesser in rank and status. The Spirit is the Lord and giver of life—on the boundary between the visible and the invisible— the breath that accompanies the Word. When the Father speaks (I mean the first person, who possesses “aseity,” or is self-derived) the Word is accompanied by breath. Antecedently present in the Son is the power to go forth like the creation. With the Spirit is the antecedent power to penetrate and bring to completion. This transitivity is greater than any barriers or boundaries we know in the world we have created for ourselves. Pneumatology is the corrective for any speech we have fashioned that would domesticate God. In its critical aspect pneumatology offers a counterpoint to the limited discourses of science, history and materialism, and excessively gendered speech. We have with pneumatology a pivot toward plenary reality, breaking the prison of rationality. This is the push-back of Rudolf Otto against the Enlightenment. Here we have a modification of the dominant language of modernity in the West, and a gesture to more ancient discourse, in which the language of the church is rooted and the view of the larger world in ours and preceding times.23

The Spirit and Afro-Christian faith What can we see if we start with the hyphen between Afro and Christian? I do not by any means want to diminish the importance of Scripture in coming to terms with pneumatology. But I want to give a fuller view of what it might have meant for Africans

176

Handbook of African American Theology

to embrace the Spirit at the point they received the gospel that was preached to them. The gospel as it was heard through the filters of their own faithful and discerning spirits caused them to know it was more than a mandate to obey their masters in the flesh and submit their bodies as a living sacrifice to persons claiming to be their proprietors. What was their sense of the Spirit? They came from and lived in a world that was not fractioned in the way as that of the ones who captured them and brought them to the Western hemisphere to give their version of the gospel. Rather, they came from a world in which there was unity within the universe. More, their sense of good and evil power deposited within them the capacity to pass judgment on what was presented as good news—as gospel. They knew and had names for evil spirits. They did not bring clean slates of consciousness—tabulae rasae—as some were wont to say. Rather, by the time they heard the language of their captors, they already were fortified with the ability to make judgments, which they expressed through their own cultural productions.

Black theology and pneumatology The iteration of the first generation of scholars who knew themselves as theologians and called their work black theology was not without serious contest. There was a nonnegotiable insistence in their work that the intellectual production on the part of black people reflecting on their experience of God was indeed theology. Because it did not conform to the template of European and Euro-American theologians, many critics attempted to remand it to the category of sociology, protest writing, social ethics—at most something other than theology. Theology was reserved for the genre that reflected primarily on thought about the idea of God. Black theological production reflected more on the meaning and experience of God under the conditions of suffering imposed on the sons and daughters of Africa. One might say the theological production of Afro-Christians looked more like what one finds in the Bible than in theology texts. The desiderata were testimony, song, prayer, lament, and yes, protest against injustice and mistreatment, especially when it was visited in the name of God—more specifically, in the name of God who hears the cry of suffering ones. This disjunction gave rise to the question of Robert Hood, “Must God be Greek?”24 It is on this fulcrum that one can pivot to the explicit production of pneumatology. Among the earliest theologians who called for pneumatology as a discrete discourse under the larger caption of black theology were Albert Cleage, Major Jones, and J. Deotis Roberts. A full-length monograph was produced by Bishop R.L. Speaks, entitled Prelude to Pentecost, and James Forbes developed his Beecher Lectures into The Holy Spirit and Preaching. There is also attention to the Spirit in Henry Mitchell’s Black Belief, and extended attention to the Spirit as author of lament in the work of Luke Powery.25

The Spirit as Mammy blowing life A treasure chest for the imagination is opened for connecting themes that take one back to the seminal image of the Spirit in creation. None is more poignant than the

Pneumatology

177

fashioning of Adam from the dust of the earth, and the breath of God being blown into the lifeless form. Again, no image is more evocative than the poet’s positioning of this great God “toiling over a lump of clay and breathing in the breath of life.” The proverbial insult added to that injury is that God is portrayed as a “mammy bending over her baby.” However, knowing the institution of the “black mammy” inserts the possibility that the child could be either the fruit of her body or the baby turned over into her custody. Potentially, what we have here is the poignant image for how all life is animated, incubated, and nurtured at its most vulnerable state. But again, there is no other image that presses deeper into the mystery of the Spirit’s work at the intersection of divine activity in fashioning the creature made in the divine image. This is so whether one speaks physically or spiritually. Put another way, whether we are speaking of the creation of Adam as the human creature coming forth from the earth at the hand of God, or Adam as the new creation in Christ, the interior, or maternal, work performed inwardly by the Spirit is without substitute. Gelpi names this work as that of the Divine Mother.26 In God’s Trombones, James Weldon Johnson presents the image of God as “mother” (mammy) bending over her baby, toiling over a lump of clay, into which “s/he” breathes the breath of life. This is the penetration of dirt by the breath (ruach) from which all life comes. In this nascent moment we are taken to the very boundary: before it there is no life; after it life abounds. This is where we find the Spirit—bringing forth from nothing, bringing the visible from the invisible. These deep interior motions correspond to the vitality of the amniotic sac. There is correspondence between the womb and the bosom of God.27 Johnson’s bold and daring image corresponds in a different direction to the image of Proverbs 8:22ff. But what image is more evocative for “seeing the Spirit” at work in our time? What greater gift is God the Spirit giving the church and offering the world than to breathe life and supply vitality into all who will not be scandalized by the hands God chooses to caress and to handle emergent life? It would mean quitting claim to any choice or predilection for giving vitality. Many can remember being prayed for by servants as devoted as the one Johnson imagines. Many churches are kept alive and brought back to life by the one whom he depicts. Could it be that in this scandalous depiction we can see the midwife of the New Birth and Pentecost—the miracle that reverses the curse of Babel and again lifts it from the curse of the twenty-first century?

Pneumatology, liberation, and salvation Pneumatology as critique Pneumatology is a perduring critique of any gesture toward a graduated ontology of the human creation—by race or gender, class, rank, or station. It envisions God moving in a radically egalitarian mode, touching all human creatures equally, giving life and vitality to animate dust into nephesh—that is, a living soul in the image of God. Similarly, when the ruach returns to the God who gave it, the dust returns to the earth as it was.28 That is to say, the Spirit is the most radically egalitarian presentment of

178

Handbook of African American Theology

divine life. This creative and egalitarian principle performance of the Spirit is manifest in a prophetic vocation that is not limited to priests or kings, but to anyone whom the Lord God may call. A consequence is a donation of power as dunamis to stand over against princes, rulers, potentates, and those who exalt themselves over other creatures and even against God. This is manifest in Israel and the prophets of Israel who withstood and chastised kings from within the nation, and those who exalted themselves as sons of gods and divine rulers of nations. The most magnificent performance in the Spirit’s procession is the preparation of the body for the Son, God incarnate. Here Mary is the paradigmatic pneumataphor, whose body is transformed into the bearer of the Son, thereby showing how any human creature can enter into similar obedience. Being joined to one another in the body of Christ by new creation in the waters of baptism and receiving the Spirit in fullness then becomes the apex of new birth and new life in Christ. Here at the intersection between Christology and pneumatology, African American Christians were keen to locate the ground of liberation that is for both soul and body. It is the nexus for prophetic witness against all powers that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. In this regard there may be no greater theological production than preaching, which declares this work of God in the face of the principalities and powers in the songs that proclaimed this liberty and signified against false rather than true religion. But also, the production of churches as cities of refuge, and parachurch institutions to extend this work of liberty, manifested the works of souls set free under God with a prophetic defiance that did not first require approbation from the kingdoms of this world. Put another way, the power supplied by the Spirit as dunamis was selfauthenticating. The centerpiece of Afro-Christian pneumatology, then, was the soul set free by the Spirit of the Lord, whose mission is precisely that—setting captives free. One sees the texts that lay hold to this claim woven into the very hermeneutic of black church life. The inaugural sermon of Jesus taking hold of the Isaianic themes—release to the captives, setting at liberty those who are bruised. But also the Pauline declaration— namely, where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.29

Soteriology and the work of the Spirit There is no mantra in the African American Church that supersedes the testimony of being saved, sanctified, filled with the Holy Ghost. Being converted and translated from the kingdom of Satan to the kingdom of the dear Son and given an inheritance among them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus. Of being in Christ, and therefore a new creature, with old things passed away and all things becoming new.30 This is the work of the Spirit. It starts with a soul set free from the shackles of sin and bondage. This is the Spirit, sometimes referred to as “somethin’ ” on the inside. Pneumatology often was articulated as a “wheel turning, a fire burning.” “Somethin’ ” that got a hold of me that makes the feet light. Or, it takes the “little me” on a vision travel. The Spirit takes holds of the tongue that can’t stop praising. One can see the derivatives of this pneumatology in countless manifestations of black church life that are never named as such but are routinely accounted for and

Pneumatology

179

authorized by the language of pneumatology. Again, one can see the pneumatological consistency of such iterations among those who are particular in naming the Spirit and in more systematic treatises like Speaks and Forbes, and Powery.

Focal question and critical task of pneumatology Continuing work must be done to keep the black church cultivating inner motions directed to the destination of liberation. This is necessary to guard against obsession with feeling and the expressive life for the sake of itself. This is what Obery Hendricks calls becoming “holy dope dealers,” who distribute sermons, songs, and other productions that do not engage the matters of liberty with the power the Spirit supplies.31 That is losing sight of the anguish and ailments: poverty, hopelessness, joblessness, addiction—racism and all its derivatives. How does the high of the soul impact the low of the body, the community, the ’hood? This is the focal question for pneumatology going forth. Likewise, pneumatology has work to do to mitigate against consumerism and obsession with material possessions as the sign of divine beneficence being exchanged for the ends of liberation. Pneumatology suited for black church life in this day and time has a vista that exists beyond the perimeters set by the fiction of an American dream, nightmare, or empire that admits only those who achieve wealth, fame, prosperity, and blessings that are measured by wealth and status. Rather, it is rooted where it begins; the Spirit who can be compared to the breath of a black woman, blown into dust, raising all who are touched by hands so loving and tender.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

See Olga Dunlop, The Living God (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989). Jn. 4:24. George Montague, The Holy Spirit: The Growth of a Biblical Tradition (New York: Paulist Press, 1976). Donald Gelpi, The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit (New York: Paulist Press, 1976). James Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998). Amos Yong and Estrelda Y. Alexander, eds., Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2011). For example, the works of E.B. Taylor and F.M. Davenport in contrast to Nimi Wariboko’s The Split God : Pentecostalism and Critical Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2018). An unsurpassed study in this regard is Estrelda Alexander’s Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2011). William C. Turner, The United Holy Church of America: A Study in Black HolinessPentecostalism (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006.); John S. Mbiti, African Religions

180

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Handbook of African American Theology and Philosophy (Oxford, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990 [1969]; Marcel Griaule, Conversations With Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: the “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Henry H. Mitchell, Black Belief: Folk Beliefs of Blacks in America and West Africa (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). Clifton Johnson, ed., God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-slaves (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1993). Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas, Preaching With Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). See D.J. Nelson, “For Such a Time as This: The Story of Bishop William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival,” A dissertation submitted for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts, Department of Theology, University of Birmingham, England, May 1981. Lk. 4:14ff. Lev. 25:10. Isa. 68:31; Acts 8:26ff. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford, New York : Oxford University Press, 2008). Turner, The United Holy Church of America. Eph. 3; 1 Jn. 3:24. Paul D. Opsahl, ed., The Holy And The Life of The Church: From Biblical Times to the Present (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1978); Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (3 vols.) (New York: Seabury Press, 1983); Michael Welker, The Holy Spirit: Flame of Fire; Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006); Molly Marshall, Joining the Dance: A Theology of the Spirit (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2003); Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996). Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit; Veli-Matti Karkkainen, The Holy Spirit in Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2002). Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011). Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Robert E. Hood, Must God Remain Greek?: Afro Cultures and God-Talk (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990). R.L. Speaks, The Prelude to Pentecost: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007); J. Deotis Roberts, The Prophethood of Black Believers: an AfricanAmerican Political Theology for Ministry (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994); Major J. Jones, The Color of God: The Concept of God in Afro-American Thought; Henry H. Mitchell, Black Belief (1975); James A. Forbes, Jr., The Holy Spirit & Preaching (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989); Luke Powery, Spirit Speech, Lament and Celebration in Preaching (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2009). Donald Gelpi, The Divine Mother. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Penguin Books, 1990 [1969]). Eccl. 12:7.

Pneumatology

181

29 Isaiah 61:2; Cor. 3:18. 30 Acts 20:32; 2 Cor. 5:17. 31 Obery M. Hendricks, “ ‘I am the Holy Dope Dealer’: The Problem with Gospel Music Today,” in Readings in African American Church Music and Worship, ed. James Abbington (Chicago, IL: Gia Publications, 2009).

14

Mad with Supernatural Joy: On Representations of Pentecostalism in the Black Religious Imagination Eric Lewis Williams

Early impressions of Pentecostalism In the highly provocative essay “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” included in his 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk, African American sociologist W.E.B. Dubois argued that there were three things that historically characterized and animated the religious lives of early Christianized Africans in North America: “the Preacher, the Music and the Frenzy.”1 For Dubois, due to the various social roles performed by the minister within the broader community, the preacher was “the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.” With regards to the Negroes’ religious music, Dubois maintained that “despite caricature and defilement,” their music “still remain[ed] the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil.” Dubois labeled this music as “the one true expression of a people’s sorrow, hope and despair.”2 But of the component most germane to this essay, the frenzy, which according to Dubois, occurred: when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and seizing the devotee, ma[king] him mad with supernatural joy, [it] was the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than all the rest. . . . [S]o firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly believed that without this visible manifestation of God there could be no true communion with the Invisible.3

Beginning in 1906, some three years after the publication of DuBois’s study, the Pentecostal movement among African Americans, largely due to its adherents’ openness to various physical manifestations of the Spirit, would be imagined and represented within print literature in myriad ways. Over time, these representations would become more complex. Examples of this can be seen in two separate accounts from the Los Angeles Times, at the height of the revival in 1906: Meetings are held in a tumble-down shack on Azusa Street, and the devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories

184

Handbook of African American Theology

and work themselves into a state of mad excitement in their peculiar zeal. Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshippers, who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve racking attitude of prayer and supplication. They claim to have the “gift of tongues” and be able to understand the babel.4

In addition to disparaging the worshippers, a September 1906 account attacks the African American leadership of the movement. Calling the movement a “disgraceful intermingling of the races,” a local newspaper reporter further states that these early Pentecostals cry and make howling noises all day and into the night. They run, jump, shake all over, shout to the top of their voice, spin around in circles, fall out on the sawdust blanketed floor jerking, kicking and rolling all over it. Some of them pass out and do not move for hours as though they were dead. These people appear to be mad, mentally deranged or under a spell. They claim to be filled with the spirit. They have a one-eyed, illiterate, Negro as their preacher who stays on his knees much of the time with his head hidden between the wooden milk crates. He doesn’t talk very much but at times he can be heard shouting, “Repent,” and he’s supposed to be running the thing . . . they repeatedly sing the same song, “The Comforter Has Come.”5

These early printed accounts in both newspapers and periodicals both biased and prejudiced the early social scientific accounts of the fledgling (though soon to be burgeoning) religious movement, leading often to wholesale and categorical dismissals of both black Pentecostals and the distinctive elements of their religious traditions.

Early scholarly observations Immediately following the early journalistic accounts and their caricatures of the African American Pentecostal experience, the first scholars to critically examine this tradition were those trained within the fields of sociology and anthropology.6 Operating largely from empirical epistemologies and employing the methods of the social sciences, by virtue of their training and modes of analysis, being preoccupied with the so-called “Negro problem,” these scholars showed very little interest in religious meaning. Seeking rather to discover what could be learned about cultural and social patterns in African American life, these early studies were particularly interested in the transformation of American religion and the attendant dynamics of black culture, migration, and urbanization. Because of a lack of sensitivity to differences in theological beliefs, a major problem attending these early social-scientific examinations was the tendency to situate and to interpret Pentecostalism within the sociological taxonomy of urban sects and cults rather than view the tradition as an institutional expression of American Christianity. By interpreting Pentecostalism within this strictly social-scientific gaze, these Pentecostals

Representations of Pentecostalism

185

were often interpreted through theories of deprivation, anomie, millenarianism, and were thus dismissed as otherworldly, apolitical and socially disengaged.

Recent developments and alternative representations Within the past few decades, as the movement expanded within African American communities across the nation, more sophisticated interpretations of the tradition emerge by those who seriously engage in the study of both black religion and culture. These more nuanced and informed perspectives create a discursive space for interpreters of black religion from both inside and outside the Pentecostal tradition, allowing those within the tradition to share their own stories and allowing informed outsiders to offer keen insights. This chapter argues for three distinct representations of Pentecostalism in the black religious imagination: l

l

l

The outsider, Zora Neale Hurston, folklorist and cultural anthropologist, represents Pentecostalism, or the sanctified church, in her writings as a modality of primal African spirituality within the New World context. The literary and cultural theorist, and former insider, James Baldwin provides us with a representation of Pentecostalism that is focused on the religious performativity and theatricality of the tradition. Finally, Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, Pentecostal pastor and theologian, and reflective insider, represents Pentecostalism as religious innovation, with much to teach the broader Christian community about the importance of religious experience in the doing of theology.

Hurston, Baldwin and Clemmons are able to give sophisticated accounts of the “supernatural joy” experienced by Pentecostal believers, which earlier outside observers often dismissed as “madness.” All three, being deeply ensconced in the complexity of black life and black religious culture, critique as well as affirm the power of the Pentecostal experience for individuals and for their larger communities. And while their particular insider/outsider statuses, as well as their own religious backgrounds and academic training, provide different interpretations of the tradition, all three thinkers affirm the dynamic, powerful and multivalent meanings of Pentecostalism within the black religious imagination.

“Old gods by new Names”: Pentecostalism as continuation of African religion Perhaps one of the earliest informed interpreters to comment upon the religious and cultural significance of African American Pentecostalism in both American religious life and culture is that of folklorist and cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. A student of renowned German-American cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, considered the father of both American and modern anthropology, Hurston would devote her studies of religion, folklore and anthropology to the cultural practices of African-descended peoples in the Americas. Though reared within the all-black

186

Handbook of African American Theology

township of Eatonville, Florida and describing herself as one “born with God in the house,”7 it was from Boas and her other social-scientific tutors that Hurston would acquire and begin to employ what she once called the “spy-glass of Anthropology.”8 It was through the lens of anthropology that she would interpret various aspects of African diasporan religious life in the Americas. Though much has been written concerning Hurston’s intrigue with African retentions in the religious lives of the descendants of Africa in the Americas, focusing primarily on her writings regarding Voodoo, Caribbean religions, conjuring traditions, folk religion, and that which she called hoodoo beliefs, much less has been made of her reflections on African survivals within African American Christianity. Though Hurston herself was the daughter of a Baptist minister, as it relates to her writings on AfroProtestant religious practices, she would relegate her anthropological observations to the shared ecumenical experiences of the conversion narratives, the call narratives, and the preaching traditions. However, it was her research into African American Pentecostalism, the tradition which she called the Sanctified Church, that would lead her to the conclusion that “the negro has not been Christianized as extensively as is generally believed. The great masses are still standing before their pagan altar and calling old gods by new names.”9 Inasmuch as she understood the tradition as having tapped into primal African spirituality and managed to remain unencumbered by the burden of black respectability and the gaze of whiteness, Hurston would provide an interpretation of black Pentecostalism as both an essentially African and a radically re-Africanizing religious tradition. In her anthropological writings dating back as early as 1926, Hurston would discuss the sanctified church as a highly distinctive form of African religion (and, to a lesser extent, American Christianity), and in doing so would point to the need for further reflection upon the tradition. According to Hurston, “the rise of various groups of saints in America in the last twenty years is not the appearance of a new religion as has been reported. It is in fact the older forms of Negro religious expression asserting themselves against the new.”10 Seeing African American Pentecostalism as the return of the repressed in New World African spirituality, Hurston would argue that one of the geniuses of this tradition is that it functions as “a protest against the high-brow tendency in Negro Protestant congregations as the Negroes gain more education and wealth.”11 In further lodging black Pentecostalism within African indigenous spirituality, Hurston would go as far as saying that in the ecstasy-filled worship experience, the worshipping Pentecostal “congregation is restored to its primitive altars under the new name of Christ.”12 Hurston, working to counter the conventional perceptions that black religious expression needed to be respectable—that is, to fit within white liturgical standards and structures—emphasizes the distinctive nature of black religious rituals when blacks refrain from religious performance under the gaze of whiteness. Hurston both locates and appreciates the more authentic spiritual praxis in these highly segregated worship spaces. But for Hurston not only was Pentecostalism understood as a clear continuation of indigenous African religion in America, she would also see within the Pentecostal tradition the potential and power to re-Africanize other forms and traditions of

Representations of Pentecostalism

187

African American music and spirituality. Seeing black Pentecostal spirituality as possessing a “revitalizing element in Negro music and religion,” for Hurston the tradition’s power rested in the spirituality’s potential for “putting back into Negro religion those elements which were brought over from Africa and grafted onto Christianity as soon as the Negro came in contact with [white religion], but which are being rooted out as the American Negro [sought to assimilate].”13 Hurston points us to the reality that Africans were introduced to a very particular form of Christianity when they were involuntarily transported to the New World, what Frederick Douglass calls “slaveholding religion.”14 So, in pointing out the continuation of African religious rituals in America, Hurston reminds us that Africans had a vibrant and rich spiritual cosmology before contact with their so-called Christian enslavers. Understanding the sanctified church as a living and breathing African institution, for Hurston, nowhere was this African and re-Africanizing principle more clearly revealed than in the ritual performance of the “Holy Dance” or shouting tradition. According to Hurston: There can be little doubt that shouting is a survival of the African “possession” by the gods. In Africa it is sacred to the priesthood or acolytes, in America it has become generalized. The implication is the same, however, it is a sign of special favor from the spirit that it chooses to drive out the individual consciousness temporarily and use the body for its expression.15

Seeing the sanctified shout as “nothing more than a continuation of the African ‘possession’ by the gods,” according to Hurston: The gods possess the body of the worshipper and he or she is supposed to know nothing of their actions until the god decamps. This is still in most Negro Protestant churches [but] is universal in the Sanctified churches. They protest against the more highbrow churches’ efforts to stop it.16

While Hurston highlights the ecstatic bodily practice of shouting, she also more importantly draws our attention to ways in which the sanctified church consciously resisted Western religious domination. Pentecostals understood the tradition of holy dancing as both protest and praise, and thus they allowed their bodies to move in designated ecclesial spaces in unsanctioned ways. In highlighting this representation of Pentecostalism, Hurston depicts the deeply African and radically Africanizing nature of black Pentecostal religious ritual. This influence would be felt in other AfroProtestant congregations as time would evolve. In light of Hurston’s observations, a number of interpreters would begin to consider the significance of Pentecostalism within American Christianity; to ponder the relationship between black Pentecostalism and African religions; and to take seriously the sanctified church as a highly distinctive institutional expression of American religion and culture. It is within the writings of James Baldwin that we can see an even fuller representation of Pentecostalism operating within the African American imagination.

188

Handbook of African American Theology

“No drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing:” black Pentecostalism as religious performance Complementing the representation of the sanctified church as African religion offered by Hurston, and further complexifying the power and beauty of that tradition, the celebrated African American literary and cultural theorist James Baldwin also attends to black Pentecostalism as a neglected yet powerful cultural and religious trajectory in American life. Like Hurston, whose father was a Baptist minister, Baldwin would receive his earliest religious instruction from his stepfather, a Baptist minister in New York City. Though Baldwin would spend his early childhood years in his father’s church, it was during the summer of his fourteenth year that, according to Baldwin, he “underwent a prolonged religious crisis [and] discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell.”17 It was at this time, through a dramatic religious conversion, that young Baldwin was taken hold of by the fires of black Pentecostal religion and for three years he would be a member and become an associate minister of a small Pentecostal congregation in Harlem. Of his time within this tradition, Baldwin would later write that he grew up “in the shadow of the Holy Ghost.”18 And it was under the shadow of the Spirit that Baldwin, now an intimate insider, would become one of black Pentecostalism’s greatest admirers and one of its harshest critics. Named by one of his critics as “America’s inside eye on the Black HolinessPentecostal churches,”19 Baldwin’s writings would expose the world to the very inner life of this tradition by exposing the moral, cultural and theological worlds inhabited by those who dwelled within her gates, and the ways in which this religion was actively performed by those who believed. Beginning with the 1953 publication of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin would expose a wider, largely secular, audience to Black Pentecostal beliefs and practices including the “tarrying” prayer tradition, the tradition of holy dancing, and the moral imperatives of the holiness codes, which served as guides for the faithful in their quests to live “in the world, but not of the world.” By consciously highlighting these particular practices, Baldwin emphasized both the percussive and performative nature of black Pentecostal spirituality; thus providing us with yet another window into how Pentecostalism was envisioned within the black religious imagination. As it relates to Baldwin’s conscious representation of Pentecostalism as a dynamic cultural and religious theater, in the introductory notes to his 1954 theatrical debut, The Amen Corner, Baldwin reveals to his readership the logic undergirding his very conscious depiction of Pentecostalism as religious performance. In efforts of shedding light upon his own creative process while simultaneously bearing witness to the drama that is black Pentecostal ritual performance, Baldwin would say of his corpus: I was armed, I knew, in attempting to write . . . by the fact that I was born in the church. I knew that out of the ritual of the church, historically speaking, comes the act of theater, the communion which is the theater. And I knew that what I wanted to do in the theater was to recreate moments I remembered as a boy preacher, to involve the people, even against their will, to shake them up, and hopefully, to change them.20

Representations of Pentecostalism

189

Drawing upon memories of his ministerial participation in the Sanctified church of his youth, Baldwin’s literary musings on Pentecostalism sought to recreate both the drama and the communion of the black Pentecostal worship experience. By depicting scenes of religious dancing, weeping, tarrying prayers, and other ecstatic liturgical gestures, Baldwin draws attention to both the individual and the corporate function of ritual performance within the black Pentecostal tradition. While the singular individual may dance or rejoice, he or she is affirmed and supported by other cast members involved in the liturgical drama, who often join in with their own acts of worship. Employing the language of phenomenology in his thick descriptions, Baldwin provides his readers with a hermeneutic, or lens of interpretation, for understanding the performance of black Pentecostal worship. In a graphic worship scene in the very first chapter of Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin provides his readers with a critical gaze into both the context (theater) and event (production) of black Pentecostal worship. As the scene unfolds, Elisha, the congregation’s musician and friend of the young protagonist is overcome by the sacred while furnishing music for an all-night prayer meeting. Upon being seized by the Spirit and entering into what appears to be a state of ecstasy, Elisha, who initially played a supporting role in the production, now temporarily becomes the main character. Baldwin seeks to capture both the intensity and dynamism of the moment with meticulous detail as he explains: He struck on the piano one last, wild note, and threw up his hands, palms upward, stretched wide apart. The tambourines raced to fill the vacuum left by the silent piano, and his cry drew answering cries. Then he was on his feet, turning, blind, his face congested, contorted with this rage, and the muscles leaping and swelling in his long, dark neck. It seemed that he could not breathe, that his body could not contain his passion, that he would be, before their eyes, dispersed into the waiting air. His hands, rigid to the very fingertips moved outward and back against his hips, his sightless eyes looked upward, and he began to dance. Then his hands closed into fists, and his head snapped downward, his sweat loosening the grease that slicked down his hair; and the rhythm of all others quickened to match Elisha’s rhythm; his thighs moved terribly against the cloth of his suit, his heels beat on the floor, and his fists moved beside his body as though he were beating his own drum. And so, for a while, in the center of the dancers, head down, fists beating, on, on, unbearably, until it seemed the walls of the church would fall for very sound; and then, in a moment, with a cry, head up, arms high in the air, sweat pouring from his forehead, and all his body dancing as though it would never stop . . . he dropped like some animal felled by a hammer—moaning, on his face. And then a great moaning filled the church.21

With descriptive precision, Baldwin fleshes out the details of this actor in the throes of his performance for the reading audience. We are meant to hear the echoes of the tambourines and see the contortions of Elisha’s body in rhythm with the clapping and singing. We are even called upon to imagine the vibrations of the “walls of the church” that may possibly fall as Elisha’s body acts like a percussive instrument. Baldwin forces

190

Handbook of African American Theology

the reader to engage his or her imagination, even as he recreates a primal scene of worship from the black Pentecostal tradition. We, the readers, become insiders—or actors—in the drama that Baldwin recreates. Further underscoring the theatrical nature of black Pentecostal religious performance, and demonstrating the deeply communal nature of the production, in his 1963 publication, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes of his own experience within the tradition. Though having been disengaged from the tradition for some time, he continues to extol the beauty, significance and the indelible imprint left upon him by the tradition when he writes: there is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, would fill a church, causing the church . . . to rock. Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, the “Word” when the church and I were one. Their pain and joy were mine, and mine was theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me. I surrendered mine to them—and their cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah” and “Yes, Lord!” and “Praise His name!” and “Preach it, brother!” sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar.22

Highlighting the soaring drama and moments of deep intensity within the worship experience he knew intimately, Baldwin provides the world with a representation of black Pentecostalism that is inextricably bound with the theatrical. Baldwin’s detailed insider accounts, along with his ability to recreate this highly sophisticated moral and religious tapestry that is the African American Pentecostal experience, demonstrated that this tradition both merited and demanded further scholarly attention.

“Beyond conceptual language and proposition”: black Pentecostalism as religious innovation Knowledgeable of both the anthropological insights of Hurston and the literary representations of Baldwin, the late Bishop Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, former Pentecostal minister and scholar from the Church of God in Christ, in both his pastoral and scholarly reflections would seek to provide an expressly theological interpretation of African American Pentecostalism. Like Hurston and Baldwin before him, Clemmons was also reared in the home of a minister; his father, Frank Clemmons, was a Pentecostal pastor and bishop in Brooklyn, New York. While Hurston was an outsider to the

Representations of Pentecostalism

191

Pentecostal tradition and Baldwin was a former insider who eventually disengaged from the tradition, Clemmons was a life-long member, an informed and reflective insider, whose roots in Pentecostalism sustained him from the cradle until the grave. Clemmons, formally trained in the fields of theology and religious history, used his insights to reflect upon the tradition in which he was nurtured and, in his doing so, we are provided with a representation of black Pentecostalism as religious innovation. Grounding his theological perspectives within the critical disciplines of church history, political theology, and Christian spirituality, Clemmons’s distinctive vocation as a pastor-scholar provided him with a unique vantage for interpreting the tongues of his native African American Pentecostal tradition to his interlocutors in each of the publics he engaged. As a black Pentecostal theologian with an orientation towards history and Christian mysticism, in his own life and ministry, Clemmons endeavored to discern, embody, and bear witness to the unique deposit of faith bequeathed to him by his enslaved African progenitors and his pioneer black Holiness and Pentecostal forebears. With his larger theological project critically situated within the religious experiences of New World Africans in the Americas, according to Wilmore, Clemmons’s tracing of the activity of the divine in human history was critically aligned with the hierophantic nature of the larger tradition of African religion throughout the diaspora. According to Wilmore, within the wider African diasporan religious experience: There [has always been], from the beginning, a fusion between a highly developed and pervasive feeling about the hierophantic nature of historical experience flowing from the African religious past, and a radical and programmatic secularity, related to the experience of slavery and oppression, which constituted the essential and most significant characteristic of Black religion.23

Seeing himself as one who sought “to point out the hidden but powerfully present footprints of God in the affairs of [humankind] and nations”24 Clemmons, according to theologian Harold Dean Trulear, “desired to strengthen the witness of his beloved [tradition] through the profferance of the spirituality of its founding fathers and mothers as a model for contemporary ministry.”25 For Clemmons, human history was the arena of divine activity and the faithful would do well “to earnestly contend for the faith once delivered.” This belief that his predecessors had a revelation of the Sacred was central to both Clemmons’s historical and theological projects. Having embraced a high view of history and envisioning a constructive theological use for this history, Clemmons asserted that “[t]he recovery of a meaningful [contemporary] faith includes the discovery and the interpretation of God’s activity and power in the past and the discernment of how this same activity and power continues today.”26 Believing that the testimonies of his forebears were crucial to this particular theological enterprise, Clemmons contended that: through the use of narrative, the [contemporary] faith community [attempts] to interpret and reinterpret the experiences of its foreparents and interface

192

Handbook of African American Theology

these interpretations with the contemporary black experience. In this, the faith community attempt[s] to live out its historical faith in the contemporary context.27

Any critical reading of Clemmons that takes his scholarship seriously must first contend with his constructive use of history for the purpose of creating a black Pentecostal spirituality. For Clemmons, a retrieval of this early history was crucial for understanding and appreciating what he saw as the innovative dimension of black Pentecostal experience, that is: taking seriously the role of religious experience as a point of departure for doing the work of Christian theology. Early on in his spiritual and theological development, Clemmons became interested in deepening his understanding of his tradition’s spirituality and theology of the Holy Spirit. Clemmons would come to see these aspects of his community’s theology as an ecumenical offering from his tradition to the broader church, with potential for opening up new avenues for both doing theology and promoting Christian unity. Realizing that these elements of Pentecostal theology “tended to move in the direction of an experiential theology focused on awe, mystery and wonder,” Clemmons would argue that these emphases gave “rise to specific concern with dogma, worship and ritual.”28 As one who consciously understood his Pentecostal faith within the context of the longer history of the Christian Church, Clemmons credited his Pentecostal foreparents for their boldness in safeguarding religious experience as a valid point of entry for doing theology. In bestowing proper credit to his predecessors for their critical theological insights, Clemmons said that though these sainted mothers and fathers “did not have access to extensive academic opportunities” and “they were bereft of the intellectual tools with which to systemize their spiritual insights into theological discourse, literacy was not a prerequisite to revelation.” Clemmons further added, “God gave to them the wisdom to penetrate behind the walls of sophisticated Christian orthodoxy and [t]hey were able get at and utilize genuine religious experience as a cure for the ills of their day.”29 In defense of their oral theological method, Clemmons maintained that “[a]lthough these elements of faith may [have] appear[ed] to be put together uncritically within the framework of an ethno-religious impulse, this serious engagement of pneumatology occasioned an essential breakthrough within the Christian tradition.”30 This breakthrough for Clemmons was his community’s modest ecumenical offering to the wider Christian church. Seeing within his formative Pentecostal tradition a vibrant ecumenical witness, he believed wholeheartedly that “Black Holiness Pentecostalism [possessed] the potential to give [a] much-needed fresh theological articulation to diverse [forms of] spirituality and [to] provide a pneumatology of spontaneity.”31 There is little doubt among scholars, church leaders [and] laypersons today that the twentieth century Pentecostal movement with its emphasis on pneumatology as the point of beginning in doing theology has challenged the traditional patristic, scholastic and protest orthodox theologies to go beyond conceptual language and proposition to experienced presence. Pentecostalism has come across as essentially

Representations of Pentecostalism

193

an experience. This accounts for its potential enrichment of theological reflection and its danger.32

In moving beyond conceptual language and propositional thinking as starting points for theological reflection to “experienced presence,” Clemmons argued that his tradition’s distinctive approach to theological praxis “continues to challenge any approach to theology that is primarily academic rather than experiential.”33 Clemmons saw this as perhaps one of the chief virtues of his community’s theology.

On the ecstasies and epistemologies of life: black Pentecostalism as the stuff of artists, preachers, and storytellers Hurston (outsider), Baldwin (former insider), and Clemmons (reflective insider) offer three distinct lenses for envisioning Pentecostalism within the black religious imagination. As an outsider, examining black Pentecostalism from an anthropological framework, Hurston is keen to connect the “sanctified church” to indigenous African spirituality, even to the extent of questioning and dismissing the tradition’s claim to Christianity. Like Baldwin, Hurston highlights both the collective ecstasies of the congregation and the congregants’ personal experiences of the sacred. For Hurston, the beauty and virtue of the sanctified church lies in its ability to remain unencumbered by the pressures of black respectability, oblivious to the white gaze, reconnecting with a grand tradition of African spirit possession, and its potential and power to help reAfricanize other forms of new world African spiritualities. Baldwin, a former insider, envisions black Pentecostalism as a theater of the sacred. In this theater, worshipping black bodies are drawn together, through the experience of the Holy Spirit, into the religious performance. With greater interest in aesthetics than Hurston, Baldwin emphasizes the beauty of black holiness worship, whose elegance could rival that of the theaters of ancient Greece. In the experience of the sacred for Baldwin, worshippers stand outside of themselves, and being overwhelmed by the holy, constitute an extemporaneous liturgical drama. For Clemmons, who understands himself as both an informed and reflective insider, interpreting black Pentecostalism from the standpoint of Christian theology allows him to envision the encounter of the Spirit as the moment of revelation. Like Hurston, Clemmons also sees this moment as tied to the African past, through the deeply moving religious experiences of his enslaved African forebears and their faith in the Almighty sovereign God who sustained them during the hell of American slavery. For Clemmons, this African past has been Christianized and sanctified, thus allowing the worshipper to experience the awe, mystery, and wonder of the Christian God. Clemmons sees this theology of “experienced presence” as innovative for Christian unity and theology today. As this chapter attempts to demonstrate, in the African American religious imagination Pentecostalism is envisioned as being concerned with: spirit (both Holy Spirit and/or ancestral spirits); materiality (both collective and individual bodies); and claims to experience and revelation. Though the three figures I have chosen speak from

194

Handbook of African American Theology

different angles as it relates to their positionality to the tradition, each one is keen to affirm the ecstatic as a way of knowing and experiencing transcendence (or something greater and beyond themselves) in the varying contexts and rhythms of life. Moreover, representations of Pentecostalism are not confined to practitioners and scholars of religion, but they envision a much wider human community. As a subject of critical human inquiry, Pentecostalism provides for Hurston, Baldwin, and Clemmons, windows for understanding life, the very stuff of life, the way life is to be lived, loved, shared, celebrated, and given. As a source for religious, artistic, and cultural innovation, black Pentecostalism continues to provide artists, storytellers, and preachers with the source material for their narratives of faith, suffering, struggle, and hope. And it is in this sense alone that the power and beauty of black Pentecostal fire yet makes its adherents mad with supernatural joy.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg & Co, 1903), 134. Ibid. Ibid. “Weird Babel of Tongues,” Los Angeles Times Daily (April 18, 1906). Jack Hayford, The Charismatic Century: The Enduring Impact of the Azusa Street Revival (New York: Warner Faith Books, 2006), 77. These scholars include Elmer T. Clark, Robert Mapes Anderson, and Arthur H. Fausett. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1942), 266. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935), 1. Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981), 103. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 104. Ibid. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 118. Hurston, The Sanctified Church, 91. Ibid., 104. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell Press, 1963), 10. Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, Conversations with James Baldwin (University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 106. Ithiel Clemmons, C. H. Mason and the Roots of the Church of God in Christ (Bakersfield: Pneuma Life Publishers, 1996), vii. James Baldwin, The Amen Corner (New York: Dial Press, 1954), xviii. James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (New York: Knopf, 1953), 15–16. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 33–4. Gayraud S. Wilmore. Black Religion and Black Radicalism (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 1. Ithiel Clemmons, “What Price Reconciliation: Reflections on the Memphis Dialogue,” in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 18, no. 1 (1996): 118.

Representations of Pentecostalism

195

25 Harold Dean Trulear, “Ithiel C. Clemmons, Bishop C.H. Mason and the Roots of the Church of God in Christ,” in Pneuma: The Journal for the Society for Pentecostal Studies 21, no. 2 (1999): 350. 26 Ithiel Clemmons, “Shaping the Coming Era of the Church of God in Christ in Eastern New York, First Jurisdiction” (DMin diss, New York Theological Seminary, 1972), 14. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 187 29 Ithiel Clemmons, “The Recovery of Biblical Holiness Part I: Holiness, The More Excellent Way,” audiocassette. 30 Clemmons, “Shaping the Coming Era,” 167. 31 Ibid., 175. 32 Ibid., 173. 33 Ibid., 174.

15

Baptism and Holy Communion: Affirming that Black Lives Matter Brad R. Braxton

My trip(s) to the Holy Land: the Jordan River and Jerusalem Through the generosity of a Baltimore civic group, I traveled to Israel in 1997. I have touched the Jordan River, the location of Jesus’s baptism. While there, I gazed at Golgotha which is also known as Calvary, the site of Jesus’s execution in Jerusalem. My United States passport facilitated the trip to Israel. Close inspection of my “spiritual passport” reveals that I traveled to the Jordan and Jerusalem long before 1997. Concerning nationality, I am a grateful citizen of the United States. Concerning spirituality, I am a grateful citizen of the commonwealth of emancipatory African American churches that Delores Williams calls the “black church invisible.” Williams employs the illustrative phrase “black church invisible” to delineate the liberating practices of African American religious communities from the oppressive practices in those communities that promote, for example, sexism, heterosexism, and classism: The black church is invisible, but we know it when we see oppressed people rising up in freedom. It is community essence, ideal and real as God works through it in behalf of the survival, liberation and positive, productive quality of life of suffering people.1

Decades before my feet touched Zion in 1997, the “black church invisible”—as manifested at the First Baptist Church in Salem, Virginia—strapped wings on my soul and transported my religious imagination to the Jordan and Jerusalem. In this loving congregation, where my father served as pastor and my mother as a lay leader, African American Christians practiced baptism and Holy Communion with grace-filled gusto.

Baptism and Holy Communion: the terms of engagement The word “baptism” comes from the Greek word baptizō meaning “to dip or immerse in water.” For Christians, baptism affirms a person’s relationship with God

198

Handbook of African American Theology

through Jesus Christ. While often associated with John the Baptizer in the Bible, baptism is—in the most radical sense—a willingness to join Jesus in death (e.g., Mark 10:38; Rom. 6:3). John’s baptism anticipated the Messiah to come. Christian baptism honors the Messiah who has come and awaits the Messiah who is coming again.2 My childhood spiritual community transported me to the Jordan River through baptism. More than forty years have passed since my father baptized me. Yet, I still hear the voices surrounding that moment. The choir sang about the Jordan River that was “chilly and cold,” and its water “chilled the body but not the soul.” As the choir lowered their voices, my father raised his: “On the profession of your faith, and in the presence of God, the angels, and this company, I now baptize you.” He lowered me into the water and lifted me into a new life of Christian discipleship. Holy Communion is a Christian ritual meal consisting of the simple elements of bread and wine (or grape juice). Yet, the meal possesses a complex constellation of theological meanings.3 The ritual commemorates Jesus’s last meal with his disciples on the evening before his execution. The meal enables believers to partake ritually in Jesus’s death, thereby reminding them of the promise of everlasting life. Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder remarks: The various designations of Holy Communion include: the Lord’s Supper, the Last Supper, and the Eucharist. The term “Eucharist” is derived from a Greek verb meaning “to give thanks” (eucharisteō). Across the centuries, Christians have come to the Communion table with great gratitude for Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice at Calvary.4

My childhood spiritual community transported me to Calvary through Holy Communion. On Holy Communion Sundays (every first Sunday), the lay leaders dressed alike, with men in dark suits and women in white dresses. My father donned a gleaming, white clerical robe with crimson velvet panels. On the wings of spirited Communion hymns, the choir lifted the congregation and placed us “down at the cross where my Savior died.”5 The lay leaders handled the Communion elements with priestly precision. After retrieving the Communion elements, people waited so that the entire congregation could eat and drink together. The grape juice in the thimble-sized glasses was barely enough to wash down the chalky residue from the white Communion wafers. Nevertheless, the community approached this sacred meal with heightened zeal, believing that this monthly, mythic trip to Calvary made all the difference in this world and in the world to come. As the meal concluded, the congregation sang exuberantly the chorus of the hymn “At Calvary”: Mercy there was great and grace was free, Pardon there was multiplied to me, There my burdened soul found liberty— At Calvary.6

Baptism and Holy Communion

199

Ritual renewal: ancient practices in contemporary contexts Rituals are a powerful language. By rituals, I mean ceremonial, symbolic actions by which people express their deepest convictions.7 Yet, rituals can lose their efficacy if they are not conversant with contemporary social issues. As African American Christians practice baptism and Holy Communion, what contemporary issues must be engaged so that these rituals can speak afresh to the present? Many recent events have impacted local and global cultures. Notable examples include the historic election and re-election of President Barack Obama, the Great Recession, and the rise of international terrorism. The emergence of another recent phenomenon—the Black Lives Matter movement—provides salient opportunities to renew baptism and Holy Communion. Social activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created the social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013. The hashtag was a response to the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager in Florida, and the 2013 acquittal of his armed killer George Zimmerman. These activists were seeking to raise public consciousness concerning the protection and valuing of black people.8 This social media hashtag has become a rallying cry of a new movement, especially in the light of the recent onslaught of lethal interactions of black people and law enforcement. The infamous and growing list includes, but is not limited to: Rekia Boyd (Chicago, Illinois); Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri); Tanisha Anderson (Cleveland, Ohio); Eric Garner (New York, New York); Freddie Gray (Baltimore, Maryland); Sandra Bland (Prairie View, Texas); Alton Sterling (Baton Rouge, Louisiana); and Philando Castile (St. Paul, Minnesota).9 The seeming inability to compile comprehensive lists of black people recently killed by law enforcement is “damning evidence of the level of violence against black bodies in America.”10 We must add to this grim social portrait “black-on-black” violence. Baltimore, Maryland is an epicenter of this epidemic. In April 2015, Freddie Gray, a twenty-fiveyear-old African American, was killed while in the custody of Baltimore police officers. This event blazoned Baltimore onto the national consciousness as both the site of another police-related black death and the site of significant civil unrest that engulfed the city for several weeks.11 In the three years since these incidents, Baltimore has struggled with escalating homicides, and most of the victims have been black people. In addition to leading a research center at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, I serve as the founding senior pastor of The Open Church of Maryland, a theologically progressive and predominantly African American congregation in Baltimore. A recent front page story in The Baltimore Sun remarked about the locale: Baltimore suffered 343 homicides in 2017—the second most in a single year, and the most per capita in city history. More than 1,000 people were shot last year.12

200

Handbook of African American Theology

In Baltimore, and many other American cities, there are passionate conversations— from social media to barber shops and beauty salons—about the ugly dilemma of violence, especially violence involving black people.

Embodiment: embracing the body We must not ignore embodied realities such as violence or economic impoverishment when considering the contemporary relevance of baptism and Holy Communion. When we fail to embrace the body, we eviscerate these rituals of their social potency. These rituals were, and are, bodily. In Jesus’s baptism, John immersed Jesus’s body in the Jordan River. Bodies also are involved in our diverse baptism practices, whether through sprinkling water on babies’ foreheads or immersing adults in baptismal pools. Additionally, the final meal that Jesus shared with his disciples was a bodily affair, involving the ingesting of bread and wine. Likewise, the contemporary administration of Holy Communion is bodily. Beyond the obvious ingesting of bread and wine, Holy Communion in some traditions incorporates additional bodily gestures. Some gestures are modest, such as congregants tracing a symbolic cross on their heads and torsos using a hand. Other gestures are more majestic, such as congregants genuflecting noticeably before high altars, washing their hands in basins of water, and wiping their hands on white towels to ensure that pure hands handle the holy elements. These pious gestures to “sanitize” the meal, while rooted in sincere piety, also might reveal a subconscious attempt to avoid the ghastly details of Jesus’s execution. Neil Elliott depicts the grotesquery of ancient crucifixion: As a means of capital punishment for heinous crimes, crucifixion was the “supreme Roman penalty” yet “almost always inflicted upon the lower class”. . . . Crucifixion was “the typical punishment for slaves”. . . . In the Roman practice, “whipping, torture, the burning out of the eyes, and maiming often preceded the actual hanging.”13

The New Testament depicts the mob mentality and brutality that surrounded Jesus’s arrest and trial before Pontius Pilate (e.g., Mt. 26:36-27:23). The four Gospels also provide glimpses of the torture inflicted upon Jesus during the crucifixion. While it had psychological dimensions, Jesus’s fatal suffering was undoubtedly bodily. The Gospel of John supplies a unique detail about Jesus’s crucifixion. This Gospel depicts a Roman soldier lancing Jesus’s side, allowing blood and water to flow from Jesus’s dead body (Jn. 19:31-37). Some patristic and medieval thinkers interpreted this graphic detail as a symbolic allusion to Holy Communion (blood) and baptism (water).14 In other words, Jesus’s execution was the spiritual fountain for these rituals. While this interpretation is theologically plausible, it underscores a problematic tendency in the ritual imagination. Some religious communities move too rapidly to “symbols” without also adequately embracing the embodied “substance” upon which

Baptism and Holy Communion

201

many rituals are founded. Deeper and different symbolic meanings might emerge from our rituals if we paid more attention to embodiment. By embodiment, I mean a robust appreciation for the full dimensions of corporeal existence. In the example above from the Gospel of John, an interpretation rooted in embodiment might attend more carefully to the tangible details surrounding this gruesome, state-sponsored execution of an innocent, African Jewish man in approximately 30 ce in a colonized outpost of the Roman Empire.15 Embodied interpretation would notice the four courageous women at the cross including Jesus’s “mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (John 19:25, niv). In the violent, male-dominated world of this ancient empire, the presence of female witnesses at an execution should not be ignored. Another noteworthy feature is the embodiment of intimate relationships as the dying Jesus implores his mother and one of his closest disciples to embrace each other as family (19:26-27). The juxtaposition of tenderness and torture is palpable. Embodiment enhances symbolic analysis by anchoring interpretation in the tangible specifics of human experience. At Calvary, a body—a young, black, male, economically vulnerable, Jewish body made in the image of God—was decimated. In the eyes of the empire, Jesus’s black life did not matter. Before examining pragmatic ways that embodiment can enhance baptism and Holy Communion, a brief exploration of political theology will be helpful.

Political theology: politics in the pews Baptism and Holy Communion can affirm embodiment, especially when these rituals are interpreted in the light of political theology. For some persons, the phrase “political theology” is oxymoronic and joins two supposedly separate worlds: politics and religion. Instead of being oxymoronic, political theology critiques the ironic nature of versions of Christianity which seek to domesticate, if not eradicate, the political symbols and semantics of Christianity. The Roman Empire executed Jesus on a charge of political sedition. This crucifixion, like countless other Roman crucifixions, conveyed a tangible warning to political pretenders: Rome was intolerant of insurrection. Yet, upon the news of Jesus’s resurrection, his earliest followers cast their gospel proclamation in overtly political language: Christ is Lord! Early Christian leaders such as the Apostle Paul defined religion in ways that included politics. N.T. Wright suggests that, when some earliest Christians affirmed that Jesus was Lord, they simultaneously were affirming that Caesar was not Lord.16 Wright imaginatively accentuates the political nature of early Christianity: “Since Paul’s proclamation clearly carried a political message at its heart . . . Perhaps Paul should be taught just as much in the politics departments of our universities as in the religion departments.”17 While some might question the inclusion of early Christian beliefs in a university politics course, I, as a proponent of political theology, want to heighten the political consciousness of people sitting in church pews.

202

Handbook of African American Theology

William Cavanaugh and Peter Scott characterize political theology in this way: The task of political theology might then be to expose the ways in which theological discourse reproduces inequalities of class, gender or race, and to reconstruct theology so that it serves the cause of justice. . . . What distinguishes all political theology from other types of theology or political discourse is the explicit attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization of bodies in space and time.18

Political theology avoids “pie in the sky” rhetoric in favor of serious analysis about how God talk empowers or disempowers bodies on earth. The embodied rituals of baptism and Holy Communion can raise awareness about just or unjust political arrangements and the ways those arrangements devalue or value black lives.

The politics of baptism I reflect below on Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism. These reflections will be followed by pragmatic observations concerning how baptism can affirm that black lives matter. In Matthew 3:13-17, Jesus’s baptism declares his readiness for the revolution represented by the “kin-dom” of heaven.19 In the synoptic Gospels, only Matthew presents a curious dialogue between Jesus and John prior to the baptism. Recognizing Jesus’s “superiority,” John urges a role reversal, protesting that Jesus should baptize him. John eventually concedes and baptizes Jesus. Matthew likely uses this dialogue to address a “messianic embarrassment” troubling some followers of Jesus. Some early Christians may have inquired, “Why would Jesus, a sinless messiah, submit to John’s baptism which was for the repentance of sins?” According to Matthew, Jesus is baptized not to repent of sin but rather to “fulfill all righteousness” (3:15). The word “righteousness” evokes thoughts of personal piety. Some Christian traditions have emphasized the personal dimensions of righteousness to the exclusion of its political dimensions. Therefore, the politically provocative characteristics of John and Jesus are often ignored. The Greek word for “righteousness” (dikaiosunē) can be translated as “justice.” Righteousness encapsulates God’s passionate commitment to set right the things that are wrong in society.20 Thus, righteousness also is a matter of social justice. Through baptism, Jesus says in effect: “I join this populist, political movement whereby God’s justice will be manifest for all God’s children, not just the powerful and the elite. I am ready for the revolution because my life, and the lives of people like me, matter!” The emphasis on repentance in the preaching of John and Jesus also indicates their radicalism. Sentimental moralizing has blunted the sharp edge of the word “repentance.” Repentance involves more than an admission of wrong. The Greek word for “repentance” (metanoia) connotes a change of mindset and the embodiment of a new identity. Perhaps, this is why the heavenly voice after the baptism refers to Jesus as the “son” and “the beloved” (3:17). This is not an announcement of Jesus’s divine

Baptism and Holy Communion

203

uniqueness but instead a divine affirmation of his political boldness.21 God is pleased with Jesus’s attachment to a radical political movement that calls for radical repentance.22 Repentance is a revolutionary action creating new ways of imagining the world. Both John and Jesus assert that only those who embody new mindsets will be fit for the new “kin-dom.” Furthermore, the means by which John and Jesus meet their deaths should convince even the most hardened skeptics about the revolutionary nature of their ministries. Neither prophet dies of old age or natural causes. Both are the victims of government-sponsored execution.

The practice of baptism: troubling the waters The Negro spiritual “Wade in the Water,” sung often in African American baptism services, insists that God is “gonna trouble the water.” In the spirit of this troublesome God, our baptism services should be more politically provocative. In other liturgical moments, we can soothe people’s “souls” with images of God, the eternal shepherd, who leads us beside still waters (Ps. 23:2). Baptism, however, is an opportune time to remember a God who champions oppressed people and struggles alongside them. This God troubles the waters of the Red Sea in order to enable the oppressed to be free. James Cone poignantly characterized the God of the oppressed: Unlike the God of Greek philosophy who is removed from history, the God of the Bible is involved in history, and [God’s] revelation is inseparable from the social and political affairs of Israel. . . . Yahweh is known and worshipped as the Lord who brought Israel out of Egypt, and who raised Jesus from the dead. [Yahweh] is the political God, the Protector of the poor and the Establisher of the right for those who are oppressed.23

To baptize people in the name of this God is to immerse them in politically turbulent waters. Baptism services should not be polite. On the contrary, they should create a guttural awareness in those about to be baptized, and in those already baptized, that following God will at times be costly. A major currency for payment of that cost is struggle, and this struggle may exact a toll from our bodies. When baptizing children, and especially when christening babies, I congratulate families for their desire to inaugurate a child’s life with a spiritually significant ritual. Yet, baptism is vacuous if it morphs into a genteel moment to acknowledge godparents, provide a gilt-edged baptism certificate with filigree font, and share an after-church baptism brunch for family and friends at an upscale restaurant. It is incumbent upon me pastorally to puncture the politeness of the moment with politics. I remind families, or the candidates for baptism if they are old enough to comprehend, that when Jesus stepped into the Jordan River to be baptized, he signed his death certificate. I then tell the families, or the baptism candidates, that in addition to baptism certificates, we also should provide them with death certificates. To serve God is to be willing to struggle for our freedom and the freedom of others, even to the

204

Handbook of African American Theology

point of death. Baptism is not a cleansing of our souls from sin; it is a marking of our bodies for struggle! At baptisms, we should call the names of those who have been martyred in movements for righteousness, and especially in the arduous, ongoing movement to affirm that black lives matter. Imagine a baptism service where, before the baptism occurs, the names of martyrs are interspersed throughout the spirited singing of “Wade in the Water.” The roll call obviously would include names such as John the Baptizer and Jesus. The roll call also might include the names of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. These four, precious black girls were attending Sunday school on a September morning in 1963 at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, when a terrorist bomb revealed that America was still savagely judging black children by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character.24 In that same baptism service, it also would be fitting to call the names of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Depayne Middleton Doctor, the Rev. Daniel Simmons, and Myra Thompson. These nine African Americans were slaughtered by a white supremacist on June 17, 2015 at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina as they read Scripture in what they thought was a sacred, and safe, place.25 The Birmingham Four and the Charleston Nine are embodied reminders that in the fight to make black lives matter, “we have come over a way that with tears has been watered; we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.”26 Salty water flows in our baptism fonts and pools. The water contains the saline tears shed by those who mourn the martyrs of the movement. God’s tears also are mixed in those baptismal waters. We present our bodies in baptism in the hope that one day God will wipe away all our tears, and that we will wipe away all God’s tears. When we finally put an “end to the very culture that has declared war on innocent, young black bodies,” God will weep no more.27

The politics of Holy Communion I reflect below on a scandal during Holy Communion in 1 Corinthians. These reflections will be followed by pragmatic observations concerning how Holy Communion can affirm that black lives matter. The Corinthian church included Jews and Gentiles, as well as social elites and economically vulnerable persons who were enslaved or recently emancipated (1 Cor. 1:26-28, 7:17-24). First Corinthians depicts a community encountering the opportunities and challenges of diverse bodies attempting to coalesce into “the body of Christ.” In 1 Corinthians 11:17-34, divisive social stratification is occurring at Holy Communion. Paul’s indignation is evident: When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. 21For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes 20

Baptism and Holy Communion

205

hungry and another becomes drunk. 22What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!

Economic inequity is at the root of the schism. The inequity manifests itself ironically during Holy Communion, the community’s sacred meal symbolizing a shared history and destiny. More specifically, as the community gathers for Holy Communion, certain wealthier members also bring elaborate “picnic dinners” and eat in front of the poorer members who lack resources for such meals. The flaunting of class differences demonstrates an inexcusable lack of concern for the community. Chastising this classism, Paul recalls Jesus’s institution of Holy Communion (1 Cor. 11:23-26). By remembering Jesus, Paul hopes to “re-member” the body of Christ, which is always “dis-membered” when one part of the body exerts power and privilege over other parts of the body. In 1 Corinthians 11:27-29, Paul implores the community to engage in discernment that will restore solidarity among believers from different economic classes: Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. 28Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. 27

By parading their social status before the rest of the church, these wealthier Christians are liable to the judgment of Jesus, who died so that barriers among diverse people might be dismantled. Pietistic interpretations have obscured Paul’s searing, social critique in this text. Many Christian traditions have fixated narrowly on identities or behaviors that constitute taking Holy Communion in an “unworthy manner.” Consequently, sanctimonious gatekeepers have placed “fences” around Communion tables, barring “unworthy” people from sharing the meal. Across the ages, the “unworthy” deemed unfit to share the meal have included persons from different denominations, divorced persons, unmarried mothers, and LGBTQ persons. In an attempt to create a “rigorous Christian purity system” enacted liturgically at the Communion table, many Christians have unwittingly defiled the body of Christ by exclusion.28 If we connect Paul’s words about taking Holy Communion in an “unworthy manner” (v. 27) with his exhortation about communal discernment (vv. 28–29), the theme of inclusion and social cohesion is abundantly clear. Paul urges the community to engage in probing self-examination (v. 28) and warns about the danger of not “discerning the body of the Lord” (v. 29). The body of the Lord is the gathered community. The unworthy partaking of Holy Communion occurs when the ritual disregards or excludes sisters and brothers. If we share this meal without concern for who is present—and concern for who is absent because of our exclusion—we eat and drink judgment upon ourselves.

206

Handbook of African American Theology

Believers should examine themselves at Holy Communion. The examination should include more than personal piety. The belief that “sin” is primarily a matter of individual piety is a symptom of the sin of classism. Donna Langston observes: Preoccupation with one’s self—one’s body, looks, relationships—is a luxury working-class women can’t afford. . . . The middle class has the leisure time to be preoccupied with their own problems, such as their waistlines, planning their vacations, coordinating their wardrobes, or dealing with what their mother said to them when they were five—my!29

At the Communion tables of middle-class African American churches, have we become so preoccupied with our class-based privileges that we have failed to “discern the body of the Lord”? The body of the Lord—not white wafers on the Communion table, but black people in underserved neighborhoods struggling to put food on their kitchen tables. Discrimination based on class status and social identity is a violation of the inclusive principles of the kin-dom for which Jesus lived and died.

The practice of Holy Communion: creating welcome tables The Negro spiritual/folk song “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table” is often sung at Holy Communion services in African American churches. One stanza declares: All God’s children gonna sit together. All God’s children gonna sit together one of these days, hallelujah. All God’s children gonna sit together. All God’s children gonna sit together, one of these days, one of these days.

Civil rights protestors sang these words in defiance of a segregated social system preventing different races from sitting together at lunch counters in the United States. Lunch counters were desegregated in the 1960s through valiant struggle and historic legislation. Yet, many Communion tables remain segregated. Some African American churches passionately protest against racial discrimination, while remaining eerily silent about oppression based on economic class and other types of social stigma. We must break the silence to enable Communion tables to become authentic welcome tables for black lives from all walks of life. At The Open Church of Maryland, where I serve as the founding senior pastor, Holy Communion became once a radical object lesson about classism and inclusive welcome tables. As an entrepreneurial church start, The Open Church benefited economically from attracting middle-class persons who were early adopters of the ministry. These persons made generous financial contributions that enabled the congregation to establish a firm footing. Amid this financial generosity, signs began to emerge that some in the congregation were becoming preoccupied with material concerns. The congregation was renting space in a beautiful Lutheran church in Baltimore. Yet, the passion for “buying our own

Baptism and Holy Communion

207

space” appeared to be more important for some persons than our establishing partnerships with communities experiencing social and economic marginalization. Additionally, a spirit of entitlement began creeping into the congregation. Some congregants seemed to feel that their financial contributions gave them a “right” to religious “good and services” (i.e., worship services and sermons) being delivered according to their “preferences.” It felt as if the relationship between some congregants and me had morphed from partnership to patronage. These congregants seemingly presumed that they were the “patrons,” and I, as the “client,” was expected to implement their wishes. To employ a different metaphor, the congregation had contracted a case of “affluenza,” which Dale Andrews defined as “a cultural disease of excess—an excess that seldom satiates the desire for more.” When affluenza is present, “our daily appetite increases as we normalize privilege. Yesterday’s privilege becomes today’s expectation.”30 As the congregation’s resident doctor of the soul, I diagnosed the situation and prescribed an antidote. On the first Sunday of Advent in 2013, we were scheduled to serve Holy Communion after my sermon. I preached a sermon titled “The Toughest Examination” that was based on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. I reminded the congregation that the Communion table brings us to Calvary, the Christian shrine of revelation. The divine light emanating from Calvary’s darkness illumines our probing self-examination, which is the toughest examination. Whenever we approach the Communion table, we should plead in the words of the gospel song: “Search me, Lord. . . . Shine the light from heaven on my soul.” As I concluded the sermon that appeared well received by the congregation, and as the congregation was eagerly preparing to share Holy Communion, I administered the antidote for classism and affluenza. Like any “flu shot,” it was initially painful, but the potential long-term benefits outweighed, in my estimation, any short-term discomfort. I issued my sermonic conclusion and supposed invitation to the Communion table with these words: As we come to the table today, I do not have time to be concerned about your individual moral transgressions. What I am concerned about are the attitudes and actions that perpetuate the sin of social inequity. Because of your social status, do you secretly feel superior to the homeless sex worker who might come to our church from a “rough neighborhood” looking for assistance for her sick child? Examine yourself. Do you have time to luxuriate in the latest gossip at The Open Church? Instead of gossiping about who said a curse word in a church meeting recently, what about the obscenity of a middle-class church nestled comfortably in a luxurious, halfempty house, eating a symbolic meal of bread and wine with thousands of poor people within miles of this comfortable house? We have yet to invite these economically vulnerable friends to our feast. Examine yourself. Discern the body. It is the toughest examination. The examination is not about us bathing our conscience so that we can eat the meal. Rather the examination may involve a refusal to eat the meal until more of our economically vulnerable sisters and brothers have a seat at the table with us.

208

Handbook of African American Theology

The dinner bell is ringing, calling us to the Communion table. Or is that the school bell ringing, calling us to take an examination? Amen.

I then came from the pulpit and addressed the congregation: As your pastor, I love you too much to allow us to take Holy Communion today. There is not enough class diversity in this congregation. We have not worked hard enough to invite economically marginalized people to the feast. If we eat this meal today, it is simply a middle-class snack, and according to Scripture, we would eat and drink judgment upon ourselves. Thus, Holy Communion will not be served today!

I pronounced the benediction. The service was over, but the “scandal” had only begun. Many congregants sat with their mouths ajar as if to say, “Did he just do what I think he did?” Other congregants smiled as they realized that my spoken sermon had been a “set-up” for the real sermon, the dramatic demonstration of not serving Holy Communion. Still other congregants were offended because my action had tampered with their “right” to take Holy Communion. Whether my audacious action was right or wrong, it inaugurated an ongoing dialogue in a middle-class congregation concerning how class-based privileges and “rights” oppress and exclude others, which is always wrong. In the quest to affirm that black lives matter, Keri Day challenges African American religious communities to consider how their practices impact economically vulnerable black people, and especially black women: Religious institutions can provide leadership in developing a moral consensus on the blight and plight of our poor. Specifically, black churches can begin to rethink anti-poverty strategies, prosperity theologies, and policy activism in order to participate in a project of hope and thriving with and for poor black women and other poor persons within an American underclass.31

Taking Holy Communion “in remembrance of Jesus” should involve remembering, including, and partnering with persons who are economically oppressed. Long before his last supper with disciples, Jesus provided etiquette for inviting people to a meal: “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 14:13-14). When we invite as Jesus taught us, Communion tables become welcome tables. At welcome tables, irrespective of creed or class, black lives matter.

The benediction: a communal rallying cry Baptism and Holy Communion are liturgical acts that can heighten the social and political consciousness of African American Christians. Most liturgies conclude with a

Baptism and Holy Communion

209

benediction. I wrote this benediction to send us forth, as we radicalize our practices of baptism and Holy Communion: Leader: A first-century freedom fighter named Jesus, living in colonized Israel, once declared, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” People: A twentieth-century freedom fighter named Assata Shakur, living in colonized America, once declared, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.” Leader: Sacred Spirit, through baptism and Holy Communion, teach us and trouble us until we not only know the truth but also do the truth. In doing the truth, we, too, are set free. Righteous action is radical abolition. People: “We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” Leader: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”32 All: Since black people were brought to America in chains, it will be heaven—or heaven on earth—when all black bodies are unshackled, and we are free, indeed! Amen.

Notes Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 205–6. 2 See Laurence Hull Stookey, Baptism: Christ’s Act in the Church (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1982). 3 See Laurence Hull Stookey, Eucharist: Christ’s Feast with the Church (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993) and Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007). 4 Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, “Holy Communion and Epiphany Commentary,” The African American Lectionary, http://www.theafricanamericanlectionary.org/ PopupLectionaryReading.asp?LRID=3 (accessed May 1, 2018). 5 These are the opening lyrics of the hymn “Down at the Cross” written by Elisha A. Hoffman. 6 William R. Newell wrote these hymn lyrics. 7 Lawrence S. Cunningham, John Kelsay, R. Maurice Barineau, and Heather Jo McVoy, The Sacred Quest: An Invitation to the Study of Religion, 2nd edn. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 79–80. 8 https://blacklivesmatter.com/ (accessed May 1, 2018). 9 Daniel Funke and Tina Susman, “From Ferguson to Baton Rouge: Deaths of Black Men and Women at the Hands of Police,” Los Angeles Times (July 12, 2016), http:// www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-police-deaths-20160707-snap-htmlstory.html (accessed May 1, 2018). 10 Christopher J. LeBron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), x. 11 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Nonviolence as Compliance,” The Atlantic (April 27, 2015), https:// www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviolence-as-compliance/391640/ (accessed May 1, 2018). 1

210

Handbook of African American Theology

12 Luke Broadwater and Ian Duncan, “Once again, Baltimore’s Mayor Has Fired a Police Commissioner. Will It Make a Difference?” The Baltimore Sun (January 20, 2018), http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/investigations/bs-md-ci-davis-firedweekender-20180119-story.html (accessed May 1, 2018). 13 Neil Elliott, “The Anti-Imperial Message of the Cross,” in Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), 168–9. 14 Gail R. O’Day, The Gospel of John, New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX (Nashville, IN: Abingdon Press, 1995), 834. 15 Concerning Jesus’s African identity, see Rodney S. Sadler, “The Place and Role of Africa and African Imagery in the Bible,” in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, ed. Brian K. Blount (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 23–30. 16 N.T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 182. 17 Ibid. 18 William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Scott, “Introduction,” in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 2. 19 Kin-dom is a term coined by feminist theologians to disrupt the unjust assumption that God is “male.” 20 Thomas G. Long, Matthew (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 33. 21 For an interpretation of Jesus’s identity and politics from a radical African American perspective, see Brad R. Braxton, “ ‘Every Time I Feel the Spirit’: African American Christology for a Pluralistic World,” in Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland, ed. Zoë Bennett and David B. Gowler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 181–99. 22 John accentuates the radical nature of his baptismal preaching with a radical (i.e., getting to the root) metaphor in Matthew 3:10: “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the tree; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” The ethical commitments of our baptismal identity compel us to expose, and perhaps expunge, the roots of unjust and unproductive social systems. 23 James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1975), 62. 24 This is an allusion to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington. James M. Washington, ed., The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), 219. 25 NPR Staff, “The Victims: 9 Were Slain at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church,” NPR (June 18, 2015), https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwoway/2015/06/18/415539516/the-victims-9-were-slain-at-charlestons-emanuel-amechurch (accessed May 1, 2018.) 26 These lyrics are from the second stanza of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” which is referred to as the Negro National Anthem. 27 Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), 232. 28 Mark W. Stamm, Let Every Soul Be Jesus’ Guest: A Theology of the Open Table (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006), 48. 29 Donna Langston, “Tired of Playing Monopoly?,” in Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (New York: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998), 132.

Baptism and Holy Communion

211

30 Dale P. Andrews, “Preaching a Just Word in Privileged Pulpits,” in Just Preaching: Prophetic Voices for Economic Justice, ed. André Resner, Jr. (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2003), 169, 171. 31 Keri Day, Unfinished Business: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Struggle to Thrive in America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012), 149–50. 32 These words from Assata Shakur have become a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Selected Bibliography Andrews, Dale P. “Preaching a Just Word in Privileged Pulpits.” In Just Preaching: Prophetic Voices for Economic Justice, edited by André Resner, Jr., 169–77. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003. Bieler, Andrea, and Luise Schottroff. The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. blacklivesmatter.com Braxton, Brad R. “ ‘Every Time I Feel the Spirit’: African American Christology for a Pluralistic World.” In Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland, edited by Zoë Bennett and David B. Gowler, 181–99. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Cavanaugh, William T., and Peter Scott. “Introduction.” In The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, 1–3. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1975. Day, Keri. Unfinished Business: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Struggle to Thrive in America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012. Douglas, Kelly Brown. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015. Elliott, Neil. “The Anti-Imperial Message of the Cross.” In Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. Richard A. Horsley, 167–83. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997. LeBron, Christopher J. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Sadler, Rodney S. “The Place and Role of Africa and African Imagery in the Bible.” In True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, ed. Brian K. Blount, 23–30. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993. Wright, N.T. “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire.” In Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation, ed. Richard A. Horsley, 160–83. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000.

16

God and Time: Exploring Black Notions of Prophetic and Apocalyptic Eschatology Lisa Marie Bowens

Time, Time, Time is winding up Time, Time, Time is winding up, Destruction in the land, God’s gonna move His hand. Time is winding up. Your Time, My Time, Time is winding up Your Time, My Time, Time is winding up, Destruction in the land, God’s gonna move His hand. Time is winding up. The words of this old Spiritual immerse us in a depiction of time’s imminent end by foregrounding the image of a clock or watch. Just as one winds a watch or clock to insure the device continues to tell time, here time itself is being wound up. But instead of time continuing, it will soon diminish. The contradistinction rings loud and clear—a reversal is about to take place. The universal nature of the song appears in its inclusion of the singer (My time) and the one who hears it (Your time). Everyone’s time, then, is at stake, the song declares, intimating a sense of time intricately connected to a judgment that is both future and divinely orchestrated. Eschatology is concerned with time, specifically the end time or the last things. How do Blacks conceive of eschatology? What biblical notions of eschatology shape their understanding of the end? The Spiritual above provides a snapshot of some blacks’ idea of time moving rapidly toward its end, but different understandings appear in black literature. By looking at several African American writings, the autobiography of James Pennington, the conversion narrative of May, a former slave, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” this essay will evaluate black conceptions of the “last things” within biblical notions of eschatology. This article begins with a brief overview of biblical eschatology and proceeds to an examination of the aforementioned black writings. Such an exploration is not intended to be comprehensive but will contribute to the conversation of black eschatology by demonstrating that eschatology for blacks: 1) includes a time of justice and judgment; 2) intersects with blacks’ view of God; and 3) embraces a divine– human partnership to secure political and social transformation of the present order.

214

Handbook of African American Theology

Eschatology—prophetic and apocalyptic The word eschatology literally means teachings or discourse about the last things or the end of the age, specifically how God will orchestrate God’s supreme and final purposes for the world and creation.1 It also includes “human expectations concerning ‘the (very) last things,’ that is, the final destiny of human beings and the world in which they live.”2 Eschatological beliefs occur in Scripture and are categorized by scholars in a variety of ways.3 For the purposes of this essay, the focus will be on two primary strands, prophetic and apocalyptic. The basic definition of prophetic eschatology consists of its emphasis on an “expected new order of reality,” a rehabilitated or reconfigured present (social and political) order in this age.4 Prophetic eschatology expects God to use humans to act within the confines of human history to bring about God’s ultimate divine plans for the world.5 Thus, this category of eschatology espouses a God who acts “within political events and through world leaders.”6 For example, in Israel the prophet interprets for the king and the nation how God’s divine plans will take place in the nation’s history and in the world’s history.7 The prophet Amos declared that the end was imminent, but this language referred to the end of northern Israel (Amos 5:18-20; 8:2). He describes the doom of northern Israel as the day of the Lord where light would cease and darkness would reign.8 For prophets like Amos the end of the world often denoted the destruction of specific places connected to Israel’s existence.9 Another aspect of prophetic eschatology appears in Isaiah’s description of a new heaven and new earth in 65:17-25 which represents an earthly life but one free of pain and hardship.10 The prophet portrays “a utopian hope, which can properly be called eschatological.”11 This utopian vision depicts the world itself as transformed.12 Accordingly, the prophets sometimes used “cosmic imagery to express the hope of a radical transformation of human affairs.”13 Eventually, prophetic eschatology waned in importance, and apocalyptic eschatology began to increase in prevalence, that is, as Israel began to shift its hope and focus to another age and time because they had lost confidence in salvific events taking place within history.14 Thus, they believed that God would use the supernatural to usher in God’s ultimate plans for the world.15 They transferred their hope from this world to another world, from human leaders to God’s supernatural agents and powers. Their hope manifested in primarily two forms: 1) hope that God would either transform this wicked world or end it and create a new one; or 2) instead of focusing on transformation or destruction of this world, hope meant retribution after death, where in the afterlife the righteous receive rewards and the wicked receive punishment.16 In both manifestations of apocalyptic eschatology, hope and justice are futuristic and occur outside of human history. Both prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology have in common what John Collins terms “future expectation.” Yet he notes, as indicated in the above paragraphs, that the “future expectation of the pre-exilic prophets was significantly different from the type of future expectation found in the Book of Daniel and certain works of intertestamental Judaism which are usually referred to as ‘apocalyptic.’ ”17 For him, the content of the future expectation is what marks the difference between prophetic eschatology and apocalyptic eschatology.

God and Time

215

For the prophets God’s ultimate actions occur on earth in “plain history” whereas in apocalyptic eschatology God’s actions occur in the supernatural realm, outside of history.18 This fundamental shift in the content and nature of hope resulted in a change of expectation of how God would act in the “last days.” Whereas “classical biblical prophecy” focused on the nation and its existence, apocalyptic eschatology, while including the nation and those considered just, extended attention to the individual’s life and human transcendence of death.19 The novum of apocalyptic eschatology is judgment of both the living and the dead.20 Therefore, although one of the significant foci of eschatology is the end, apocalyptic eschatology is equally concerned with what lies beyond the end.21 The subsequent discussion will demonstrate that biblical notions of eschatology shape African Americans’ views of the end times. This is not to say that African Americans adopted these frameworks unequivocally, but rather that elements of these perspectives inform how some blacks view the “last things.” At the same time, African American experience shapes the way they apply biblical notions of eschatology and the way in which they echo these features in their work. In the narratives of James Pennington and the ex-slave named May, apocalyptic eschatology’s emphasis on retribution after death appears prominently, whereas in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” prophetic eschatology’s emphasis on the nation, and God’s action in human history with human agents finds a more distinct focus.

God the impartial judge James Pennington lived in the nineteenth century and spent twenty-one years as a slave. In his autobiographical narrative The Fugitive Blacksmith; or Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, he writes about slavery’s horrors and its devastating effects upon black minds, bodies, and families. By explicating the “chattel principle” he chastises Christian whites’ justification for this peculiar institution. He states: The sin of slavery lies in the chattel principle, or relation. Especially have I felt anxious to save professing Christians, and my brethren in the ministry, from falling into a great mistake. My feelings are always outraged when I hear them speak of “kind masters,”—“Christian masters,”—“the mildest form of slavery,”—“well fed and clothed slaves,” as extenuations of slavery; I am satisfied they either mean to pervert the truth, or they do not know what they say. The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness, are its inevitable consequences.”22

Pennington vehemently rejects the prevalent notions in his day that slavery was good for African Americans and that it provided for their salvation in a Christian land. Likewise, he denies the idea that the existence of good Christian masters makes slavery acceptable. He queries, “Yes, sirs, many of our masters are professed Christians; and what advantage is that to us?”23 Since slaves are still beaten, raped, sold, and families separated by

216

Handbook of African American Theology

Christian masters, Pennington sees no value or benevolence in the slave system. Instead, he witnesses only the oppression and degradation of a system that strips blacks of their dignity and their human worth. He writes poignantly of this obloquy: It is the chattel relation that robs [the slave] of his manhood, and transfers his ownership of himself to another. It is this that transfers the proprietorship of his wife and children to another. . . . On looking at the family record of his old, kind, Christian, master, there he finds his name on a catalogue with the horses, cows, hogs, and dogs. However humiliating and degrading it may be to his feelings to find his name written down among the beasts of the field, that is just the place, and the only place assigned to it by the chattel relation. I beg our Anglo-Saxon brethren to accustom themselves to think that we need something more than mere kindness. We ask for justice, truth, and honour as other men do.24

For Pennington, the denial of slaves’ humanity and intrinsic value illustrated the evil of slavery and the slave trade. After his repudiation of the institution in the preface of his narrative, he goes on to tell about his life in slavery and his escape. His rejection of slavery, his refutation of its justification by whites, and his own life story provide significant context for the final part of his narrative, the letter he sends years later to his master who he knows is old and will soon die. He reminds his former master of the owner’s evil deeds and urges him to repent before he dies so that he may be saved. Two quotations demonstrate Pennington’s aim: I would, to convince you of my perfect good will towards you, in the most kind and respectful terms, remind you of your coming destiny. You are now over seventy years of age, pressing on to eternity with the weight of these seventy years upon you. Is not this enough without the blood of some half-score of souls?25 If the Bible affords no sanction to slavery (and I claim that it cannot), then it must be a sin of the deepest dye; and can you, sir, think to go to God in hope with a sin of such magnitude upon your soul?26

Pennington’s admonition to his former slave owner about how he will “go to God” reveals his eschatological framework, a framework that consists of justice, retribution, and judgment after death. He urges his former owner to review his life and to remember that “at the awful bar of the impartial Judge of all who doeth right” he will meet all of the slaves he abused in the past including the slaves he presently owned.27 Pennington goes on to list the names of the slaves that his master will meet in judgment and concludes this enumeration with the statement, “Sir, I shall meet you there.”28 This graphic depiction of the “last things,” where oppressor and oppressed meet face to face, is for Pennington God’s ultimate act of reckoning and making right what is wrong. Pennington also depicts this time of justice and retribution as a time for slaves to speak and to be heard, for he describes this event at the “bar of God” as a time when he will be able to make a complaint to God against his former master.29 Whereas, in the past, his owner would not listen to him or to the other slaves, his master would now have to listen, and this time in God’s presence.

God and Time

217

Pennington asks his former master to review not only his past actions with his slaves but also all the privileges his master enjoyed such as the fine education and his continued exposure to the “gospel of love” throughout his life. These benefits, Pennington argues, bestow upon his previous owner no excuse for his adherence to slavery. He had all the benefits of knowledge, both secular and religious, and yet did not utilize it for truth and justice. He will face these facts at the judgment unless he changes before he dies.30 Pennington’s emphasis on justice and retribution demonstrate an apocalyptic eschatological outlook, a framework that entails reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked in life beyond death, a central feature of this perspective.31 Indeed, Pennington pictures life beyond death as the antithesis of his own earthly experience. He writes in the final paragraph to his master, “In yonder world you can have no slaves—you can be no man’s master—you can neither sell, buy, or whip, or drive.”32 Pennington delineates an “eschatological reversal,” a new age after death, where evils such as slavery no longer exist and the hope of freedom and dignity is ultimately attained.33 This hope enables him to envision an alternative to the present social order.34 In this form of apocalyptic eschatology, hope and justice are futuristic and occur outside of human history but are deeply affected by what happens inside human history. The actions of Pennington’s former master affect his future judgment. Thus, although eschatology is ultimately about the last things, the outcome of these last things depend upon the former things, including the present. Pennington’s depiction of judgment describes the ramifications of his former master’s past and present conduct.35 One of Pennington’s main goals as he states in the letter is to persuade his master to change his behavior, and so he provides a fitting example of eschatology’s ability to impact anthropology. Frederick Ware insightfully observes this aspect of eschatology when he says, “Eschatology is vision not only of a certain end but also of a people’s true humanity. This vision inspires people to moral and ethical action.”36 In Pennington’s case, the eschatological vision he casts for his former owner serves to call him to do what is right as well as to demonstrate that justice will prevail, whether or not his former enslaver heeds his admonitions. Pennington’s desire for the slaveholder’s salvation is quite extraordinary and demonstrates a sad irony that the amazing care and concern he exhibits toward the slaveholder’s soul is more than the care and concern the enslaver gave to Pennington’s body and mind.

God looked down through time In God Struck Me Dead, an ex-slave named May describes her supernatural experiences and how God revealed God’s self to her. She states, [God] shows me things, but they are spiritual and come from his matchless wisdom, and the world can’t see nor understand them. I profess to know nothing about the world nor its ways. I can’t read a line either of the scriptures or any other kind of writing, but I do know this: Whenever the truth from heaven is read before me, I can talk to the Father. . . . The soul that trusts in God need never stumble nor

218

Handbook of African American Theology

fall, because God, being all-wise and seeing and knowing all things, having looked down through time before time, foresaw every creeping thing and poured out his spirit on the earth. The earth brought forth her fruits in due season. In the very beginning every race and every creature was in the mind of God, and we are here, not ahead of time, not behind time, but just on time. It was time that brought us here, and time will carry us away.37

May’s language here reveals her understanding of the divine nature of God. God as allwise, all-seeing and all-knowing reveals God as one who was before time, who creates time, and who orchestrates all things according to the divine timetable. Her words point to God’s sovereignty over time and articulates that time is an instrument of God. God controls time, time does not control God. May’s divine encounters reveal a God intimately connected to the lives of the slaves, a God who speaks to them and leads them in every area of their lives, and in May’s case, a God who enables her to overcome the boundary to knowledge, a boundary enacted by the slave system. Although she cannot read because she was “fearsome to be seen with a book when [she] was a slave,” God imparts knowledge to her, so much so that she can say with assurance that “[God] never leaves me in ignorance. Neither does he leave any that trust him in ignorance.”38 For May, the God who grants her knowledge and creates and controls time is ultimately the God who judges the slaveholders. May’s narrative, although filled with divine experiences, is also filled with the atrocities of an enslaved life. Near the end of her account she explicates a terrifying scene she witnesses on a plantation. Her words paint a ghastly picture: [Old man F.] had a lot of slaves, and he was a devil on earth. I never saw as many dead babies in my life as I did on his farm. He used to walk or ride down through the field and take his foot and kick poor women that were with child and cause them to have miscarriage right there in the field. Then he would call the Negro foreman to bring a cart and haul away this damn _____.Women with small babies were allowed to take their babies to the field and put them under trees until nursing time. . . . I actually saw old man F. walk through the field and, seeing a baby crying, take his stick and knock its brains out and call for the foreman to come and haul off the nasty, black rat. Yes, in them days it was hell without fires. This is one reason why I believe in a hell. I don’t believe a just God is going to take no man such as that into his kingdom.39

May’s previous depiction of a God who is all-seeing and all-knowing most certainly influences her language here. If she, a mere mortal, saw what took place on this plantation, then God must have witnessed the actions of this slave owner also, and in doing so God cannot allow him into the kingdom. God as arbiter of time is also arbiter of justice and judgment. God will use time to bring the slaveholder to a deserved end and hell becomes the means by which God will mete out this justice. May depicts life in slavery as hell also, which indicates her belief in a “temporal hell” characterized by slaves’ physical and mental torment and an “eternal, spiritual hell” reserved for people like old man F.40

God and Time

219

Like Pennington, May adheres to an apocalyptic eschatological framework in which retribution and justice occur after death. For both Pennington and May their confidence in God’s future eschatological action rests upon God’s character. In his admonition to his former owner to change his ways, Pennington repeatedly refers to God as the “impartial Judge” reminding his previous master that God does not favor masters over slaves, whites over blacks. God judges rightly and is not relegated to societal polarities and classifications. Similarly, May names God as a “just God” that cannot allow someone like Mr. F. into the kingdom. As Kimberly Connor observes, “Through conversion, African Americans gained the power to name not only themselves but their God.”41 By calling God “just” May exhibits the power of naming. The reference to God’s righteous character combined with her previous depictions of God’s omniscience and omnipresence help form the basis of her belief in hell. The wrongs of the world must be made right.

Co-workers with God In his renown “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. writes a powerful missive in response to eight white clergymen who denounced the tactics of King and the Civil Rights Movement. In a methodical and erudite fashion, King answers each one of their objections, offering biblical, historical, and social scientific reasons for the need of the African American nonviolent struggle for freedom. For the purposes of this essay, focus will be placed on echoes of the prophetic eschatological framework present in King’s correspondence. One of the primary elements of prophetic eschatology is the emphasis on a new order, both political and social. The present is rehabilitated and reconfigured by historical events and figures which are agents of God’s saving activity.42 In response to the criticism that he is an outsider intruding into Birmingham, King ripostes that his presence answers a request for assistance with racial injustice in Birmingham. Significantly, he frames his purpose in Birmingham in prophetic language as follows: Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth century prophets left their little villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Graeco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.43

With this prophetic description of his task, King aligns the mission of fighting racial inequality with the prophets’ call for justice and care for the poor. Just as the prophets called for a transformed social and political reality, King’s goal entailed a transformation of the present order in which segregation and discrimination no longer exist. Moreover, King associates the movement’s civil disobedience with the prophetic, noting that in

220

Handbook of African American Theology

the Book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to obey Nebuchadnezzar because they believed God’s law superseded human statutes.44 King adamantly calls for change, and this demand occurs most vividly in his response to those who continue to say the Negro must wait because time alone will bring about equal rights for blacks. He says: It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. . . . We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard [work] time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy. . . . Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.45

King’s focus on being “co-workers with God” illustrates the divine–human partnership emphasized in prophetic eschatology. A significant biblical example is Isaiah’s naming of Cyrus as God’s anointed (45:1) and “identifying God’s great act of deliverance with a historical event, the rise of Cyrus, the king of Persia.”46 In this event, the prophet declares that “the future has broken into the present,”47 for Cyrus becomes an example of how God utilizes human agents to bring about God’s purposes in history and in the present order to ensure God’s will is done on earth since the present needs transformation. Analogously, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement is an act of divine deliverance breaking into the present where activists work with God to ensure God’s liberating future occurs in the here and now. King returns to the prophetic in answering the accusation that he is an extremist. He offers Amos the prophet as an example. He remarks, “Was not Amos an extremist for justice—‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ ”48 Like Amos and others before him King sees himself as a radical for justice. King’s closing remarks demonstrate his desire for a transformed society, one in which the “dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities.”49 For King, transformation through the divine and human working together will allow present reality to become a new reality where brotherhood and sisterhood exist between the races and thus the nation becomes what God destined for it to become. Again, prophetic eschatology “envisioned God accomplishing divine plans within the context of human history and by means of human agents. God acted within political events and through world leaders . . . these events would occur on earth, within the normal bounds of history, brought about by God through human means.”50 Like the prophets of old who continually called upon their nation, Israel, to repent for its injustice, its neglect of the poor, and its sin against God’s laws and statutes, King calls upon America, his nation, to repent and change its ways as well to bring about God’s plans for justice and equality. His charge coheres with that of the Old Testament prophets in their call for political and social conversion.

God and Time

221

The above examination of King’s letter does not intend to deny apocalyptic elements in his writings. I have argued elsewhere that the apocalyptic permeates his work.51 The present brief analysis aims to illustrate that this particular correspondence can be understood within a prophetic eschatological framework. The emphasis here is that the end goal of transformation is on the nation, on a “restored earthly society” in which God’s purposes transpire in history and are translated into the “politico-historical realm of everyday life.”52 To be sure, this letter does not cohere with all of the various features of the prophetic eschatological schema; yet this examination illustrates that certain features instrumental to blacks’ own liberation discourse appear in their writings.

Conclusions Eschatology is often thought to provoke other-worldly, pie-in-the-sky ruminations, so that those who hold these beliefs neglect engagement in present struggles for justice and freedom. However, the above analysis has demonstrated that this is not always the case. Pennington adhered to retribution after death, a feature of the apocalyptic eschatological framework, but his work in the abolitionist movement and his continued struggle for racial justice evidenced in his writing and speaking advocated change in society’s racial attitudes and prejudices. Likewise, May, the former slave, believed in the kingdom and hell but demonstrated agency in her audacity to teach others the things God revealed to her. Moreover, the prophetic eschatological lens through which we read King’s essay rests upon the future breaking into the present through divine and human means. Each of these eschatological snapshots reveal that eschatology is intricately linked to an understanding of God as impartial judge, God as just, and God as co-worker. Furthermore, these black writings demonstrate a connection between eschatology and soteriology, for they espouse a view that the God who saves my soul is also the God who rectifies wrongs whether in the present or in the future. What these three African Americans illustrate is that elements of both apocalyptic and prophetic eschatology appear in black discourses of justice, providing ways in which African Americans affirm God’s ultimate act as judge and the importance of divine and human agency to orchestrate liberation for every human being.

Notes 1 2 3

Mitchell Reddish, Apocalyptic Literature: A Reader (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995), 19. Martinus C. de Boer, “Apocalyptic as God’s Eschatological Activity in Paul’s Theology,” in Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination, ed. Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston (Minneapolis, MO: Fortress Press, 2016), 46. Jörg Frey, Eschatology of the New Testament and Some Related Documents, ed. Jan G. Van Der Watt, WUNT 2/315 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) aptly comments that “Eschatology has always been one of the most disputed fields within New Testament exegesis. . . . Eschatology . . . is full of unresolved questions that cover a number of dimensions” (3).

222 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

Handbook of African American Theology de Boer, “Apocalyptic,” 49. Reddish, Apocalyptic Literature, 20. Ibid. Paul Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 11. John J. Collins, “From Prophecy to Apocalypticism: The Expectation of the End” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, ed. John J. Collins (New York: Continuum, 1998), 129. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 133–4. Ibid., 134. Reddish, Apocalyptic Literature, 20. John J. Collins, “Apocalyptic Eschatology as the Transcendence of Death,” Visionaries and Their Apocalypses, Issues in Religion and Theology 2, ed. Paul D. Hanson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983). Collins writes about the expectation of the prophets, stating, “I take it that all scholars agree that the expectation of the prophets focused on the life of the nation. Whether they prophesied doom or salvation, the issue was the peace and prosperity of Israel in the promised land” (62). Collins, “From Prophecy,” 134. The relationship between prophetic eschatology and apocalyptic eschatology is debated. Reddish, Apocalyptic Literature, 20. Ibid. Collins, “Apocalyptic Eschatology,” 61. Hanson, Dawn of Apocalyptic, 11; Collins, “Apocalyptic Eschatology,” 68. Collins, “Apocalyptic Eschatology,” 68. John J. Collins, “Apocalypses and Apocalypticism (Early Jewish Apocalypticism),” Anchor Bible Dictionary vol. 1, 283. Collins, “Apocalyptic Eschatology,” 66. James Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; Or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly A Slave in the State of Maryland, United States (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850; reprint Connecticut: Negro Universities Press, 1971), iv. Ibid., xi. Ibid., xii. Ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid., 82. Ibid. Ibid., 83. Ibid. Collins, “From Prophecy,” 147. Pennington, Fugitive, 84. See Dale Allison, “The Eschatology of Jesus,” The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism Vol 1. The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, ed. John Collins (New York: Continuum, 1998), 267–302. See especially 281–3 for a discussion of eschatological reversal. See also Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 291–7. Frederick L. Ware, African American Theology: An Introduction (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 171.

God and Time

223

35 See also James H. Cone, “Calling the Oppressors To Account: Justice, Love, and Hope in Black Religion,” The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, ed. Quinton Dixie and Cornel West (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999), 74–85. 36 Ware, African American Theology, 171. 37 Clifton Johnson, ed., God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-slaves (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969), 156–7. 38 Ibid., 156. May could be characterized as another nineteenth-century “proto-womanist” whom the “Spirit of God consecrated, compelled, enlightened, and fortified” (109). See Mitzi Smith, “ ‘This Little Light of Mine’: The Womanist Biblical Scholar as Prophetess, Iconoclast, and Activist,” I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi Smith (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 109–27. 39 Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 161. 40 Yolanda Pierce, Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative (Gainesville, FA: University Press of Florida 2005), 8. 41 Kimberly Rae Connor, Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 23. 42 de Boer, “Apocalyptic,” 49. 43 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 290. 44 Ibid., 294. 45 Ibid., 296. 46 George W.E. Nickelsburg, “Eschatology (Early Jewish),” The Anchor Bible Dictionary vol. 2:581. 47 Ibid. (emphasis added). 48 King, “Letter,” 297. 49 Ibid., 302. 50 Reddish, Apocalyptic Literature, 20. 51 See my forthcoming article, “Apocalyptic Reverberations in the Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” The Word Made Flesh: Biblical Rhetoric in the Speeches and Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press). 52 Hanson, Dawn of Apocalyptic, 12.

Bibliography Allison, Dale. “The Eschatology of Jesus.” The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. Vol. 1 of The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity. New York: Continuum, 1998. Collins, John J. “From Prophecy to Apocalypticism: The Expectation of the End.” The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. Vol. 1 of The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity. New York: Continuum, 1998. ——. “Apocalyptic Eschatology as the Transcendence of Death.” Visionaries and Their Apocalypses. Vol. 4 of Issues in Religion and Theology. Edited by Paul D. Hanson. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983. ——. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Biblical Resource Series. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. ——. “Apocalypses and Apocalypticism (Early Jewish Apocalypticism).” Pages 282–8 in vol. 1 of The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freedman. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

224

Handbook of African American Theology

Cone, James H. “Calling the Oppressors To Account: Justice, Love, and Hope in Black Religion.” The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption. Edited by Quinton Dixie and Cornel West. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Connor, Kimberly Rae. Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. De Boer, Martinus C. “Apocalyptic as God’s Eschatological Activity in Paul’s Theology.” Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016. Frey, Jörg. “New Testament Eschatology—an Introduction: Classical Issues, Disputed Themes, and Current Perspectives.” Eschatology of the New Testament and Some Related Themes. WUNT 2/315. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Hanson, Paul. The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979. Johnson, Clifton H., ed. God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-slaves. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969. King, Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by James Melvin Washington. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986. Nickelsburg, George W.E. “Eschatology (Early Jewish).” The Anchor Bible Dictionary vol. 2. Edited by David Noel Freedman. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Pierce, Yolanda. Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005. Raboteau, Albert. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Reddish, Mitchell. Apocalyptic Literature: A Reader. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995. Smith, Mitzi. “ ‘This Little Light of Mine’: The Womanist Biblical Scholar as Prophetess, Iconoclast, and Activist.” I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader edited by Mitzi Smith. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015. Ware, Frederick L. African American Theology: An Introduction. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016.

17

Methodological Development in African American Theology: The Influence of Past Historical Periods upon Contemporary Black and Womanist Thought Walter R. Strickland II

Introduction The body of written work by black and womanist theologians continually expands but little attention is devoted to method. This essay examines the development of methodology among black believers during significant epochs in American history. Furthermore, it assesses the influence of significant periods upon contemporary African American theology. The three historical periods explored are: the Pre-Civil War Era (1619–1864), the Institutionalization Period (1865–1908), and the Civil Rights Era (1909–68). While the methodological evidence from these periods abounds in contemporary African American theology, the scope of this essay is limited to the earliest manifestations in the first and sometimes second generation of black theologians as defined by Dwight Hopkins.1 This historical methodological analysis identifies how social, intellectual, and ecclesiastical phenomena influenced the development of doctrine among black Christians. This study recognizes the ongoing methodological influence of African religion upon black and womanist theology as well as socio-analytical criticism, the development of the complex black subject, and more. There is no single methodology within African American theology and this assessment offers the possibility of a more meticulous appraisal of the field. Consequently, contemporary theological development is equally informed by historical and present day influences that shape theological formulation.

Pre-Civil War Era (1619–1864) The pre-Civil War Era begins in 1619 when the first recorded African slaves were sold in the “new world,” and extends to the waning days of the Civil War in 1864. During

226

Handbook of African American Theology

this period, the relationship between blacks and the Christian faith changed drastically. Christianity’s influence was difficult to quantify at the beginning of the era with the customary tools of historical and sociological analysis, but Christianity became a significant feature of the black community by the war’s end.2 This rich period of development for black Christianity produced two methodological foundations for contemporary African American theology, namely the enduring influence of African religion and participatory biblical interpretation.

African traditional religions and black Christianity During the Pre-Civil War Era the Christian faith emerged from the black experience with a disposition that empowered blacks to stand in the midst of racial oppression. Characteristics of black antebellum faith are rooted in a rich African religious heritage that has continually shaped African American theology despite doctrinal distinctions. In Introduction to African Religion, John S. Mbiti describes various aspects of African religious belief; particularly the echoes of holistic spirituality, narrative orientation, and communal solidarity remain prominent in contemporary African American theology.3 Holistic spirituality conveys the all-encompassing nature of religious belief that cannot be compartmentalized.4 African American Christians have inherited an integrative religious methodology that, in many ways, escapes the Enlightenment’s influence and allows the divine to interact with the totality of life. True to African religiosity, black Christianity’s influence profoundly shapes all areas of human existence including social interaction, political involvement, and economic activities.5 The holistic religious worldview of African traditional religions (hereafter ATR) imparted a vital methodological assumption into African American Christianity that allowed blacks to undercut the dualistic faith intentionally imparted to them that was intended to uphold black inferiority. Dualism disjointed spiritual freedom from physical freedom and in so doing allowed for blacks to believe that scripture intended to provide freedom for the soul and bondage for their bodies. As a result, such theology resulted in the docility of countless black slaves who were convinced that by serving their masters they were serving God. The same ideological convictions are present in contemporary African American theology, as James Cone argues for the holistic liberation of body and soul, saying, “the problem of oppression in the world today is defined not exclusively in terms of race but also in terms of the great economic gap between rich and poor nations and the haves and the have-nots within them.”6 Likewise, J. Deotis Roberts explains, “We seek a Christ above culture who is at the same time at work in culture and history for redemptive ends—setting free the whole person, mind, soul, and body. Jesus speaks to the need of blacks to be whole persons in a society in which they are ‘mere faces in the crowd.’ ”7 Mbiti also highlights the narrative (or oral) disposition of ATR.8 Oral tradition was the sole method of chronicling religious truths and customs in ATR, in contrast to the Christian Bible or the Qur’an of Islam. The legacy of religious orality endured the Middle Passage and functioned as a medium for imparting biblical truth. Widespread illiteracy among blacks during the Pre-Civil War Era placed orality at the center of

Methodological Development

227

slave life which functioned as the transmitter of the Christian faith, despite being a bookish (i.e. Bible oriented) faith. The slave experience, marked by toil in the fields, afforded blacks the opportunity to internalize and identify with the stories of God’s chosen people, Israel, and his divine intervention on their behalf. The narrative orientation upheld by the African American preaching tradition shaped the methodological commitments of black theologians in the enduring use of biblical narratives as an exegetical point of departure. This phenomenon is most clearly seen within the hermeneutical trajectory set by the Exodus and the subsequent liberation imperative in contemporary African American theology.9 Lastly, Mbiti underscores communal solidarity in ATR. Communal solidarity was given a new meaning during the slave experience due to the capture, transport, and sale of human persons into chattel slavery with little regard to familial and tribal relationships. Communal solidarity finds immediate application in the biblical description of family and church life. Contemporary African American theology assumes responsibility for the welfare of the community over against the individual.10 In Afrocentric Christianity, J. Deotis Roberts credits a rich family heritage for low levels of delinquency and widespread success in the family line.11 Roberts offers an expanded treatment of the family’s role in social uplift in his book cleverly entitled Roots of a Black Future: Family and Church.

Participatory biblical interpretation Academic study in the West prides itself on detached objectivity from the objects or ideas of study. Contrary to trends in contemporary Western scholarship, African American theologians resisted making scripture an object of study by thrusting themselves into the biblical narrative. This methodological distinctive emerged from African orality when slaves rehearsed the biblical narratives during excruciating days of labor in the fields. Slaves began identifying with the Hebrew people and declared themselves to be insiders in the scriptural drama. Their identification with the story established their identity within the people of God.12 In particular, the Exodus narrative holds a place of prominence among the Old Testament accounts because it demonstrates slavery to be against God’s will and nature. As a result of God’s unchanging character, the promise of deliverance was certain, then and now, and this supposition blossomed within the African American Christian tradition.13 James Cone applies Exodus 13:1-3 to the contemporary black experience by affirming God’s preferential protection and political emancipation of Israel (the weak) against the Egyptians (the strong).14 Cone also argues, “The exodus of Israel from Egypt was a revelation-liberation. In this revelatory event, Israel came to know God as a liberator of the oppressed, and also realized that its being as a people was inseparable from divine concomitance.”15 Cone’s reading of the Exodus energizes his praxis orientation that is committed to scripture being relevant to the struggles of black readers.16 His interpretation of the

228

Handbook of African American Theology

Exodus is fundamental to his hermeneutic that interprets the Bible as the revelation of Christ as liberator from social and political oppression. Moreover, the poor recognize that their fight against injustice is not only consistent with the gospel, but is the gospel of Jesus Christ.17 Said differently, Cone insists that black liberation is not the product of an interpretative paradigm that is forced upon scripture, or the application of the gospel; rather, it is the gospel message itself.18 Cone’s view of Christ as liberator coupled with the insistence that Christians participate in the biblical story has far reaching economic, political, and social implications.19 In sum, the chief theme that Cone derives from scripture that in turn drives his hermeneutic is liberation for the oppressed, and that liberation is necessarily political. Likewise, Roberts argues that, while Christ remains the norm of the Christian life, the Exodus of God’s people from captivity provides a central interpretative category for the Old Testament. Furthermore, in Roberts’s view, the work of Christ and the Exodus provide a clear trajectory for the historic and contemporary mission of the church.20 These related Pre-Civil War developments, while not exhaustive, help quantify the methodological textures found in African American theology. The Institutionalization Period provides two additional developments to understand contemporary black and womanist thought.

Institutionalization Period (1865–1908) The Institutionalization Period dawned with emancipation at the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and ended with the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1908. This period encompasses what is often called the Reconstruction Era and the beginning of Jim Crow Segregation. The conclusion of the Civil War granted de jure freedom for blacks, but the grip of de facto oppression remained. Oppressive vestiges of chattel slavery lingered well beyond Reconstruction by means of systemic racial segregation and economic inequality.21 In contrast to the Pre-Civil War Era when blacks resorted primarily to internal religious responses to oppression, in the Institutionalization Period the black community established ecclesiastical and educational institutions that engaged the nexus of faith, racism, and public life.22 The institutional awakening of this era produced an intellectual religious agency that blossomed into an increasingly complex African American theological landscape and specific theological claims like “God is a Negro.”

The complexity of the African American theological landscape Independent schools and denominations provided blacks the autonomy to openly dwell upon Christian faith and practice without white oversight for the first time. This freedom resulted in a theological dialogue among black Christians that became multidimensional in a short period of time. An impasse emerged between the coexistence of the growing intellectual rigor of black faith and the long-standing emotive practices reminiscent of the African religious tradition.

Methodological Development

229

Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne warned against “ignorant mode(s) of worship” and called for an “intelligent ministry to cure this religious fanaticism.”23 In contrast with the sophisticated level of formal religious thought, the majority of believing blacks in the South preferred strongly emotive ecclesial practices over learned oratory.24 During the Institutionalization Period, anti-intellectualism tainted the view of increasingly educated blacks toward the church. The tension swelled as black Christian intellectuals and well-to-do business professionals grew increasingly intolerant of a generation of preachers who had been the longstanding leaders of the black community. Aging ministerial leaders quickly began to symbolize the past rather than the future.25 By the 1980s, the New Negroes, well-educated men and women characterized by talent, optimism and self-confidence, were in the prime of their personal and professional lives.26 The New Negroes conveyed a sense of being that was markedly different from their more religiously-inspired parents.27 Among them was renowned public intellectual W.E.B. DuBois who, after visiting rural black churches in the South, identified much to critique about “the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.”28 While this fissure continued to develop during the latter years of the Institutionalization Period, contemporary African American theologians captured the best of the emerging intellectual imperative and the raw passion for nascent African American faith. Cone argues: The truth for the black thinker arises from a passionate encounter with black reality. Though that truth may be described religiously as God, it is not the God of white religion but the God of black existence. There is no way to speak of this objectively. It is subjective, a personal experience of the ultimate in the midst of degradation. Passion is the only appropriate response to this truth.29

Cone’s heartened disposition, while common to African American theologians, runs counter to the desired emotionless objectivity that is prized in academic theology.

“God is a Negro” Henry McNeal Turner’s declaration “God is a Negro” was a significant declaration that emerged from the religious autonomy of the Institutionalization Period. Turner was accused of “becoming demented” in the Voice of Missions periodical, a publication that he would eventually serve as editor. In response, Turner made two arguments and a reasonable conclusion for this logic. Turner argued, “[Black people] have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that god is a Negro, as you buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man.” Turner also insisted that “Every race of people since time began who has attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or by any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves.” As a result, Turner concludes that “the Negro will believe that the evil is black and that the Negro favors the devil, and that God is white and that the Negro bears no resemblance to Him.”30

230

Handbook of African American Theology

Contemporary African American theologians picked up Turner’s sentiment and theological rationale, and it became normative to affix blackness to the person of Christ among Black Theology’s first generation. J. Deotis Roberts decries the common black/ white symbolism that insists “white is good” and “black is bad.” The insidious nature of the binary stretches into the realm of morality by asserting that light is associated with moral good and darkness is related to the morally obtuse. Roberts continues by insisting that light is associated with love and moral conversion, while darkness is connected to hate and reprobation.31 The light/dark binary emboldens the assumption of Christ’s whiteness and reinforces a negative theological value commonly attributed to blackness.32 Retrospectively, Roberts concludes that theologically authenticated color symbolism caused the metaphysical shift that was the pretext for justifying slavery with scripture and was the cause for Christ’s hair and skin to be bleached of his Jewish ancestry.33 Black Jesus allows the theologically fortified racial significance of Christology to be newly appropriated to affirm black dignity in the person of Christ. While African American theologians attribute blackness to Christ in different ways, the essential idea of redeeming blackness allows African Americans to identify with Christ in new ways in the struggle for racial justice. In sum, the increased religious autonomy of the Institutionalization Period that allowed for a freer exchange of theological ideas among blacks served as a diversifying force in the black theological dialogue.

Civil Rights Era (1909–68) The Civil Rights Era, broadly considered, spans from the formation of the NAACP in 1909 and conclude with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The Civil Rights Era was marked by new questions brought forth by historically underrepresented voices in the academy. These questions arose from methodological developments that shaped the liberal arts disciplines as a whole and produced seismic shifts in theological studies. The methodological shifts accounted for in the Civil Rights Era provided the environment for the nearly contemporaneous emergence of Latin American Liberation Theology, Black Theology, Feminist Theology, and later Womanist Theology. Two of the theoretical developments that are fundamental to contemporary African American theology include studies from the societal margins and the development of a complex subjectivity.

Studies from below/margins The story of history has been chronicled by the wealthy and powerful. History’s selfinterested nature has resulted in historical accounts that disregard first person descriptions of subdominant figures. Throughout America’s history de jure and de facto racial oppression and gender bias have prohibited blacks and women from speaking for themselves in historical accounts. As a result, the story of American Christianity is the story of white (often masculine) faith that includes “marginal” characters in so far as they support white historical actors.

Methodological Development

231

Prior to the Civil Rights Era, history proper was consumed with the military exploits of social elites like rulers, generals, and the rich. In these accounts, if common persons appeared as individuals, they were often portrayed to perpetuate off-color caricatures and stereotypes. Common people were typecast and depicted as being greedy, stupid, and driven by undesirable lusts. Otherwise, common people appeared in masses, mobs, and rarely as well-developed protagonists in a historical narrative. The historical task shifted with the emergence of two British historians in the 1960s and their publications: The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson and The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rude. Despite being viewed as seditious traders for championing a common perspective, both authors offered personhood to anonymous faces in the crowd. Thompson and Rude validated unheard accounts of seminal moments in European history that were silenced because of their modest social location. These pioneers marshalled accounts from the margins to describe the agency of ordinary people, acknowledge their contribution to the historical narrative, and explore the ideological commitments that informed their actions. This shift in historical methodology was the methodological forebear that initiated theologizing from the margins, and specifically from the black experience. The history of formal theology parallels the commitments of the historical profession. Theological reflection demonstrates an equivalent self-interested tenor that excludes the inquiry of those on the societal margins from formal theological consideration. Said differently, theologians approach the biblical text seeking answers to inquiries from their own lived experience. This theory was authenticated when theology for the oppressed did not emerge on a large scale until representatives of victimized populations acquired theological expertise to produce scholarship that engaged their inquiries. This speaks to the continued disinterest on significant moral questions related to human rights and the powerless among privileged theologians.34 In the same vein, Cone argues, “The appearance of Black Theology on the American scene is due primarily to the failure of white religionists to relate the gospel of Jesus to the pain of being black in a white racist society.”35 In an effort to theologize with the black community in mind, scholars who shared the black experience banded together to develop black theology as a critique of the theology-from-above methodology employed by the dominant culture theologians.36 As the acknowledged “father of black theology” Cone set the agenda for many black theologians by insisting that theologizing for the oppressed and destroying racism in society requires disassociation with “the irrelevancies of white Christianity.”37 For Cone, to achieve liberation, blacks need a new theological space to affirm black selfdetermination, carve out their own destiny, and insist upon the essential worth of blackness.38 Likewise, Roberts maintains that black theology must arise from the black experience to challenge black Christians to worshipful obedience in their unique life circumstances for the purpose of social change.39 Entrance into the fold of black theology assumes that the theological task begins and ends with the black experience in mind. It is significant that African American theologians departed from “normal” academic theology for the constructive purpose of developing a systematic and comprehensive exposition of the Christian faith with oppression as a chief source and not as an attack on white churches or theology.40 This

232

Handbook of African American Theology

means that undertaking black theology assumes the Christian makes a commitment to prioritize the needs of the black poor, which had often been excluded from theological analysis.41

The development of complex subjectivity Historical and theological inquiry from below that incorporates black perspectives fostered the development of a complex black subjectivity.42 The historic posture of blacks offered infrequent opportunities to think on their own as a people or about themselves as individual subjects (or actors) in history. As a result, whiteness was defined as normative or superior and blackness was relegated to being “other” and routinely represented as primitive or deviant.43 This essential methodological development leveraged by contemporary African American theologians allowed blacks to break free from the black/white binary that upheld and perpetuated white supremacy. The black/white binary assumed a hierarchal arrangement that placed whites in a position of prominence and blacks in a posture of subservience. The complex black subject allows African Americans to escape an oversimplified view of blackness and explore a more comprehensive meaning of the black subject. W. Lawrence Hogue argues that explorations into black subjectivity burst onto the scene with the pioneering scholarship of W.E.B. DuBois in the mid-to-late twentieth century. DuBois challenged the violent representation of the African American as deviant with this now-famous concept of double consciousness.44 Double consciousness offered a more fluid black subjectivity that allowed blackness to embody a hyphenated reality composed of a complex of multiple valid identifications.45 Thus, blacks simultaneously retain their blackness while acquiring additional personal characteristics. DuBois and others tilled the intellectual soil that allowed the possibility for African Americans to theologize from the complexity of the black experience in view. Despite the potential for a more complex understanding of blackness, a singular black masculine narrative remained the principal catalyst for the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. As a result, the needs of black women were often unrepresented or disregarded all together. The commitment to a black masculine narrative went unchallenged within these movements in the 1950s and 1960s and forced black women to rethink the complexity of their own composition on issues of public policy, social issues, and religious affiliations.46 Literary theorist bell hooks, among other black women, employed the tools of postmodern theory to explore the hybridity of black femininity. The postmodern critique of essentialism that challenges the notion of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture as mass consciousness opens new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency.47 This allows for the affirmation of multiple authentic black identities and a varied black experience.48 DuBois and hooks pioneered the way for womanists to theologize considering the tridimensional aspect of the black female experience, namely racism, classism, and sexism.49 After a consistent feeling of homelessness among feminist and black theologians, Jacquelyn Grant identified that addressing racism and sexism in isolation is inadequate

Methodological Development

233

because each “ism” has a life of its own and must be thwarted together for black women to be liberated.50 In her quest for an ideological home among marginalized theologians, she found that, on the one hand, the interests of white women were central among feminist theologians because the shape of the movement was determined by their chief concerns. Thus, Grant said, “all women” (among feminists) excluded black women because the white female experience is normative and the movement was constructed to meet their needs. On the other hand, in her ground-breaking article, “Black Theology and Black Women,” Grant turned liberation theology’s fundamental critique upon black theology’s first generation and asserted that it oppressed black women. She argued, “Where racism is rejected, sexism is embraced. Where classism is called into question, racism and sexism have been tolerated. And where sexism is repudiated racism and classism are often ignored.”51 In sum, the possibility for a complex black subjectivity provided the opportunity for blacks, and later for black women, to explore a fully orbed view of blackness that comprises a robust black experience that informs the constructive efforts of contemporary African American theologians.

Conclusion The theological identity of contemporary African American theology is rooted in the methodological developments that arose from significant historical periods in history. While no theology is beholden to its historical past in a deterministic manner, it is none the less informed by history while maintaining its ability to shape it in a Godhonoring fashion. Awareness of the historical and methodological pressures that shape specific doctrinal traditions affords today’s theologians the opportunity to understand their theological proclivities and how they might influence them when undertaking the theological task today. Black theologians have offered a clear line of sight to a robust theology that emerges from the black experience. Since black and womanist theologians have secured a place in the academy, the black theological enterprise is able to look outside of itself and proactively contribute to the longstanding discourse in the academy. In doing so, African American theology will enrich and be enriched without fear of losing its distinctiveness as a theological sub-discipline.

Notes 1

In Dwight N. Hopkins’s Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 87, he defines the parameters of the first and second generations of black theologians as follows: “Two developments—the 1966 statement in the New York Times by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen and the publication of James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power in the Spring . . . started the first generation of black theologians. . . . The seeds of these two events have produced the fruit of the second generation of black theologians. The rise of this second group was marked by the appearance of two 1979 articles by younger writers, including Jacquelyn

234

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Handbook of African American Theology Grant’s ‘Black Theology and Black Women,’ and ‘Black Theology and Marxist Thought,’ was by Cornel West.” Blacks have been, per capita, one of the most Protestant ethnic groups in the country. See Paul Harvey, “Black Protestantism” in American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future, ed. Keith Harper (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 120. See J. Deotis Roberts, Black Theology in Dialogue (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press), 24. John S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion 2nd edn. (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), 10 and 29. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, 10; 197–8. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1997), xiv. J. Deotis Roberts, Black Political Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 2005), 119. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, 4. More in the next section. Also see: James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 20th Anniversary edn. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1990), 47; J. Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation 2nd edn. (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 2005), 9; Deloris S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 2, 5–6. Also see James H. Evans, “The Future of Black Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 314. J. Deotis Roberts, Africentric Christianity: A Theological Appraisal for Ministry (King of Prussia, PA: Judson Press, 2005), 114–16. James H. Evans, We Have Been Believers (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1992), 41. Also see: John Coffey, Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 148–55. Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 47. Ibid. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 32. James, H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, revised edn. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 75. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 1. Ibid., 3. Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation, 9. Specifically through the convict leasing system. See John B. Boles, The South Through Time: A History of an American Region (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 362. Mark Noll, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 49. Daniel Alexander Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (North Stratford, NH: Ayer Company, 1968), 265. Noll, God and Race in American Politics, 54–5. William E. Montgomery, Under their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 334.

Methodological Development

235

26 Thomas C. Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 204. 27 Ibid. 28 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, Barnes & Noble, 2003), 139. 29 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 19. 30 Henry McNeal Turner, The Voice of Missions, February 1, 1898. 31 J. Deotis Roberts, Black Theology Today: Liberation and Contextualization (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984), 11. 32 Ibid., 12. 33 Ibid. 34 Patrick Bascio, The Failure of White Theology: A Black Theological Perspective (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 6. 35 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 4. 36 Bascio, The Failure of White Theology, 1. 37 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 116. 38 Ibid., 6 and 8. 39 Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation, xiii. 40 James H. Cone, For My People (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 53. 41 James H. Cone, “Black Theology from a Historical Perspective,” Bangalore Theological Forum 22, no. 2 (1990): 19. 42 Subjectivity relates to understanding the self and is the quality or condition of viewing things exclusively through the medium of one’s own mind or individuality (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn., s.v. “Subjectivity”). 43 W. Lawrence Hogue, Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 1. 44 DuBois employed the idea of “double consciousness” in his now famous collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk. In it, DuBois explains the complex reality of being both African and American (DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 9). 45 Hogue, Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives, 28. Other DuBoisian works demonstrating the complex nature of blackness are: The Philadelphia Negro (1903), Black Reconstruction (1935), and The Encyclopedia of the Negro (1931–46). 46 bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness” in Postmodern Fiction: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 626. 47 hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” 628. 48 Ibid., 629. hooks is careful to assert that when blacks critique essentialism, it is not a denial of a “black essence” and the recognition of black identity, but the multiple experiences of black identity must be acknowledged. If this diversity is ignored, it is easy to identify blacks with one of two categories: nationalists or assimilationists, or black-identified or white identified. 49 hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” 628–9. 50 Jacquelyn Grant, “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Experience as a Source for Doing Theology, with Special Reference to Christology” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, Vol. 2 1980–1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1993), 279. 51 Jacquelyn Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Women,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2nd revised edn. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1993), 323.

236

Handbook of African American Theology

Bibliography Cone, James H. Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). ——. A Black Theology of Liberation, 20th anniversary edn. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990). ——. God of the Oppressed, revised edn. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). DuBois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003). Evans, James H. We Have Been Believers: An African-American Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). Grant, Jacquelyn. “Black Theology and Black Women.” In Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2nd revised edn., Vol. 2 1980–1992, edited by James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1993). Hogue, W. Lawrence. Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness.” In Postmodern Fiction: A Norton Anthology, edited by Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Mbiti, John S. Introduction to African Religion, 2nd edn. (Halley Court: Heinemann, 1991). Roberts, J. Deotis. Black Political Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005). ——. Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology, 2nd edn. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005). Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993).

18

The Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement of African American Theological Production James S. Logan

African American theological production: the rise of black theology and womanist theology Rising from the tragic travails and sublime hopes of black life and history in (what is now) the United States of America, African American theological production developed as a resource to make sense of, challenge and endure an earthly ethos of systemic threat to black bodies, souls and spirits. Relating African American Christian theology to the circumstances of American history, Gayraud S. Wilmore rightly maintained that black theology, which by the late 1960s had developed into an intellectual spark, “did not just fall from the sky, nor was it born in the minds of scholars.”1 Indeed, a distinctive form of African American theological production called “black theology” was a “theological renaissance,” which “arose out of what Ralph Ellison described in another context as ‘a concert of sensibilities’ among leaders within the institutional Black Church as they sought to respond to events in the secular society.”2 Indeed, as Wilmore reminds us: From the beginning [Black Theology] had an institutional base, first within the churches themselves, and then within interdenominational organizations such as the National Conference of Black Churchmen (NCBC),3 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), the Alamo Black Clergy of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Philadelphia Council of Black Clergy, and other local and reginal caucuses.4

Within such organizations black churchmen (largely and quite embarrassingly absent the voices of black women) produced various documentary statements that mobilized and propelled a quite public socio-political and moral theological movement “within and alongside religious institutions as a counterpoise to secular groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The National Urban League and Congress of Racial Equality. Black Theology was, in a

238

Handbook of African American Theology

sense, the intellectual spark that flew from the anvil of oppression upon which the Black religious groups were hammered into existence.”5 The more formal intellectual development of African American theological production (for example as a church discipline) began in the academy with the 1969 publication of James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power. And as is true of all African American theological production since Cone’s initial publication, the political and ethical context of black theological pronouncement has been hermeneutically and eclectically grounded in the distinctiveness of the historical memories, the current lived experiences, and future hopes of collective black life.6 With the publication of Cone’s second book, A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), a self-conscious aim was set to jettison reliance on the contributions and relevance of white male Christian theologians like Barth, the brothers Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Moltmann, etc., and instead to draw on sources grounded in black experience, history and culture, as well as on a liberation-focused black Christian rendering of revelation, scripture and tradition. Here the communal, moral, and public aim was to make the political and cultural task of liberating the oppressed from temporal bondage coterminous with none other than God’s liberation of black people as the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is important to note that Cone acknowledged some initial failures (as leveled by his brother Cecil, Gayraud Wilmore, Charles Long and others) to cite black religion and history, as well as the influences of traditional African religions on African American Christianity as sources for his black theology of liberation. It is now well established that such omissions were corrected by Cone in subsequent writings and public speeches. Cone’s groundbreaking theological work set off decades of theological discussion, debate, controversy and audacious hope within and without intersecting black religious scholar, black church, and wider academic and public circles. All of Cone’s initial and subsequent work demonstrates a distinctive aspect common to all African American theological production, namely the ever-present call, as noted by J. Deotis Roberts, “for [theologies] that grow out of the experience of the black American.”7 Roberts’s vicarious concern called upon black theologians “speak out of the suffering and experiences of black Americans for whom the promise of ‘freedom and justice for all’ has not been kept.” Like Cone, Roberts’s distinctive advocacy was for a theology that considered, spoke to, and was in communion with the lives of everyday black folk. He was critical of “programs in political theology [that were] highly theoretical, ivory-tower pursuits indulged in by those far from the fray.” Indeed, Roberts’s self-consciously black political theology championed the need “for empirical programs by and for those engaged in the struggle for liberation.” Such a liberation struggle required, on Roberts’s view, that “[t]he white oppressor must be confronted by the scandal of particularity. He must not be allowed the escape hatch of universality.”8 It is now widely understood to have been an unfortunate omission that much of the initial development of a distinctively black theology included levels of hegemonic masculinity that spoke of and re/produced African American theology within an echo chamber of utter (or near utter) maleness. Of course, this fact mirrors what was generally true of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as many of the various socio-

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

239

political, economic, and cultural movements associated with black nationalism. Certainly, the intra-political, ethical and public life of African American theological production as expressed in the rise of black theology had, at least initially, failed to apprehend the centrality of women in the development of distinctively black constructions of Christian theology, be they deemed liberationist or political by their male authors. The enormous contributions of African American women theologians (as well as their sisters in a wide variety of other religion subfields) routinely resisted and/or endured the sexism of male-powered Christian churches, academic guilds, and the wider society, while simultaneously wrestling with the dripping racism and persistent classism which soaked these same multiple and intersecting spheres of their lives. In short, black feminist and womanist theologians,9 ethicists and others developed their work in simultaneous interdependence with, and opposition to, the theologies produced by both black men and white women. Speaking to the crucible and celebration of black women’s lives, Katie Geneva Cannon has been credited as the first woman to appropriate Alice Walker’s “womanist” concept10 “as a theologicalethical method”. Indeed, in the important “Preface” to Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, the epistemological foundation that speaks both within and beyond the academy to the everyday life-world of African American women is described in the following way: Womanists share extensive stories full of contextual complexities each time we meet. We speak from a bittersweet place that is informed by our daily reorientation in a race-, sex-, class-conscious society. We talk about African American women’s multiple labels—some self-applied, others culturally imposed. As daughter, sister, niece, cousin, mother, lover, wife, friend, girl, woman, child—each of us speaks from a place that has been turned upside down and inside out by inequities in a social system that is anything but just. Of great import to the ongoing intellectual life of womanism is our commitment to move our scholarship from the peripheries of various fields while simultaneously making our way of seeing, saying, and doing accessible to audiences that extend beyond the academy.11

With regard to “extending beyond the academy,” Katie Cannon spoke a challenge to the academy’s insistence on employing only the tools of empirical scientific methodologies as the ground of all that is to be considered verifiably sound and true in the academic enterprise. This challenge can be heard, with profound clarity, in the 2014 documentary Journey to Liberation: The Legacy of Womanist Theology, where Cannon declares: Being a front-runner in a lot of this work, people want to dismiss the truth that I speak as anecdotal. . . . If I don’t have a scientific database where I can prove what I’ve experienced is true for so many people then it’s not true. So the epistemological sea of forgetfulness is when people take truth that hurts, truth that goes to the core of the being, truth that goes to the marrow of the bone, and people want to say if you can’t prove it scientifically, factually, then it doesn’t exist. So what I try to

240

Handbook of African American Theology

encourage people to do is that kind of truth that stings like a serpent’s tooth, that kind of truth that makes your teeth itch, the kind of truth that cause some people to lose their minds up in here, up in here. So even when people call your truth a lie, tell it anyway, tell it anyway.

With Cannon’s words one clearly hears the echoes and critical relevance of Patricia Hill Collins’s black feminist epistemology, which embraces “concrete experience as a criterion of meaning.”12 Collins herself quotes Cannon’s contention that a legacy of struggle constitutes a prominent core theme of a black women’s standpoint: “Katie Cannon observes, ‘throughout the history of the United States, the interrelationship of white supremacy and male superiority has characterized the Black woman’s reality as a situation of struggle—a struggle to survive in two contradictory worlds simultaneously, one white, privileged, and oppressive, the other black, exploited, and oppressed.’ ”13 Indeed, the concrete experiences of black women’s ways of knowing and being in the world are forged in the everyday routines and spaces of their lives, as well as in the remembrances of those who have lived unsung lives of womanist inspiration in the past alongside others whose historical narratives are better known: Jerena Lee, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Amanda Berry Smith, Lucy Kirk Williams, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Billie Holiday, to name a few. The important work of womanists continues to pay attention to the multiple jeopardies, and legacies of resistance and survival of black women. Drawing on the work of Deborah K. King, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes has written of the “multiple jeopardy” faced by black women, including the cultural specialization of “racialized sexism” and “[the black] community’s [own] ambivalence about the meaning of being Black and female in America.”14 Beyond the important “rhetorical convenience” of terms like double jeopardy and triple jeopardy,15 Townsend Gilkes highlights King’s caution that “terms like double and triple jeopardy often obscure ‘the dynamics of multiple forms of discrimination,’ ” and suggests that complex and subtle forms of oppression and resistance are both personal and communal, and vary among the “outsiders within”16 as African American women experience their distinctive perspectives on culture and social change. More recently, millennial womanist voices have emerged, drawing on the work of Eboni Marshall Turman, to [amplify] engagement with black women’s cultural sources, [including] e-platforms, social media, fashion, hip-hop culture, and other forms of pop culture.” Indeed, as Turman notes, millennial theological voices attend: ‘to the entire imaginative culture that generates communal survival and flourishing for black women, womanists are using new modes of communication. Recently, Melanie Jones and Liz Alexander have asserted “millennial womanism” as a way of “doing womanist work in the age of social media, Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, trap music, mass incarceration, religious pluralism, [and] a kaleidoscope of gender and sexual identities.” Millennial womanists like Lyvonne “Proverbs” Picou, Danyelle Thomas, Candace Simpson, Onleilove Alston, Candice Benbow, and

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

241

storäe michele have engaged this work through the creation of sacred e- and aesthetic interventions that “do ministry and advocacy without waiting for traditional institutions” to hire millennial black women.’17

Although the distinctiveness of African American women’s voices intersecting church, society and academy has been expressed in the development of womanist and black feminist theology and ethics, the “bottom-line, common denominator” of a black woman religious scholars’ perspective has been “a passionate commitment ‘to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.’ ”18 Indeed Jacquelyn Grant has proclaimed that “My central argument is this: Black Theology cannot continue to treat Black women as if they were invisible creatures who are on the outside looking into the Black experience, the Black Church, and the Black theological enterprise. It will have to deal with the community of believers in all aspects as integral parts of the whole community.”19 Now, well into the twenty-first century, Grant’s words make it as unfortunate as ever that many black male theologians and ministers must continue to be challenged to relinquish a commitment to a maledominated Christian faith and practice, albeit James Cone himself, as far back as 1978, proclaimed that “It is truly amazing that many black male ministers, young and old, can hear the message of liberation in the gospel when related to racism but remain deaf to a similar message in the context of sexism.”20 And so now too, in the academy, church, and public domain, are the hitherto heterocentric social binaries commonly associated with sex and gender being disrupted in the name of life-affirming human presence. Certainly the womanist theoethical scholar Eboni Marshall Turman has been right to insist, for example, that: Interrogating the social category “black woman” also demands making space for the many varieties of black women’s sexualities, gender identities, and family ethics, including the perspectives of black trans women and black femmes. Although queer black women have consistently been leaders in womanist theology, its emphasis on Christian experience—which tends to erase the lives of black queer folks—has limited its ability to engage robustly with heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

The scholarship and activist commitments of thinkers like womanist ethicist Jennifer Leath, womanist theologian Pamela D. Lightsey, black queer ethicist Thelathia “Nikki” Young, and sexual ethicist Monique Moultrie represent this critical strand of black women’s theoethical discourse that deepens the earlier contributions of theologians like Kelly Brown Douglas. [Important merging scholars,] Benae Beamon, Elyse Ambrose, and Whitney Bond are [emerging scholars] whose black queer ethics and womanist sexual ethics trace their roots to black feminist and womanist foundations even as they gesture toward more expansive theological and ethical imaginations. As womanist theologians continue to engage broader constructions of the category “black woman,” their questions take on new meanings . . .21 And, of course, traditional categories of “black manhood” and “maleness” can be similarly interrogated.

242

Handbook of African American Theology

The ethics of violence, liberation, and reconciliation The political grammar of African American theological production as envisioned and developed along intersecting and diverging male and female trajectories has always stood in concomitant relation to ethical/moral concerns of communal, familial, individual and public value. This is to say that a distinctive feature of all African American theological productions (“liberationist,”“womanist,”“political,” or otherwise) is that they never fail to signal critical engagement with moral dilemmas, moral community, moral discourse, and moral vision within the wider domains of US society and beyond.22 Whether one is referencing sources as theologically diverse as Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Roberts’s Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology; Delores Williams’s Sisters In the Wilderness; Cannon’s Katie’s Cannon; Emilie Townes’s Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil; Monica A. Coleman’s Not Alone: Reflections on Faith and Depression; Jonathan L. Walton’s Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism; Kelly Brown Douglas’s Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective and Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God; Melanie L. Harris’s Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths; Thelathia “Nikki” Young’s Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination; Almeda M. Wright’s The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans; or Vincent Lloyd’s Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology, an ethical ethos of explicit/implicit moral principles, virtues and values has cohabited all African American theological (or somehow related) production. And this ethical dimension which accompanies African American theological production always wrestles with, deals with in some form or another, the persistence of black pain and suffering, that is, the systemic violence routinely perpetuated upon black bodies, minds and spirits. Here an explicit–implicit grappling with the theodicylaced question of God’s justice, goodness, faithfulness, and love, as well as the associated question of what is morally permissible in opposition to temporal pain and suffering, lie at the heart of the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. Here serious theological questions about the possibility of Divine racism, and the necessity and goodness of redemptive suffering, present themselves.23 So whether the political and cultural task of African American theology is to kill, indeed to murder, white-affiliated Gods “who do not belong to the Black community” (as proclaimed by James Cone24) or to raise the voices of “Womanist theologians, who dialogue on the basis of woman-inclusive wilderness experience” where signals of an Exodus-like liberation have not been fully realized, there is an existential suffering and, therefore, theodicy-laced questions that lie at the center of the moral reasoning and deliberations that accompany African American theological constructions. Veiled or not, the duel theological realities of suffering and theodicy constitute key currents for African American theological analysis as such analysis finds its context rooted to the political lives of African Americans.25 And yet, even with a foundational theological concern for questions of black suffering and theodicy, African American theological productions (also at its core) celebrate life in the midst of struggle. As African Americans produce theological work we continue to dance, make love, sing and shout, laugh like hell, make art, we think and reason and imagine a human present and future

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

243

bound by God’s celebratory Love, even if by a thread at the intersection of Good Friday Passion and Easter Joy. In all of this, one of the most fundamental ongoing concerns for African Americans has been the ethical questions surrounding the moral permissibility of violence to achieve temporal liberation, reconciliation, and (finally) a just peace in communal, individual, and public life. With regard to moral concerns around the permissibility of individual and collective violence, African American Christian history has been quite clear. Despite the now all too convenient public cultural embrace, high social stature, and nostalgic remembrances given to the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s (especially as influentially expressed in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the pre-1966 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and within a few other quarters of African American Christianity), black religious history, the history which grounds African American theological production, has (more often than not) embraced the moral goodness and/or necessity of violence in the US American context. With regard to the moral acceptability of Christian violence, not only has African American theological production needed to consider the extraordinary and revolutionary lives of black Christians like David Walker, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass as witnesses to religiously justified violence, from the eighteenth-century Revolutionary War period to the present twenty-first-century military conflicts in the Middle East, African American Christians have (by and large) been willing to wield the State’s armaments of violence and destruction against its enemies, both domestic and “foreign.” Therefore, the high cultural status of remembrance afforded the Civil Rights Movement fronted by Martin Luther King, Jr. with a national holiday, monument, and museum, represents a religio-political symbolic outlier relative to the African American Christian’s common acceptance of violence as a moral means in the pursuit of some teleological justice aims. This has been true of African American Christians whether or not our willingness to resort to violence has been waged against or in support of State authority, or some combination of the two as was the case, for example, with Sojourner Truth.26 Moral communities of African American Christians have never truly exhibited a legacy of mass nonviolence. This fact notwithstanding, episodic African American nonviolent movements (when at their sublime best) have quite powerfully served the nation’s public moral conscience as extraordinary visions of what a better nation and Christian ethos might entail, both communally and publicly. And of course, from a legal and social movements perspective, the modern Civil Rights Movement propelled the passage of important Civil Rights legislation, namely, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and has inspired today’s nonviolent Moral Monday Movement and revived Poor People’s Campaign against persistent poverty and widespread legislative malpractice against the most venerable among us. It must still be remembered however that King’s public theology of nonviolent direct action—which set a seismic religious and political standard during the Civil Rights and Anti-War period, and grounded primarily in the Christian gospel of agape love, as well as the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, the theological and philosophical guidance and works of Howard Thurman, the nonviolent and organizational brilliance of Bayard

244

Handbook of African American Theology

Rustin, and the democratic vision and strategic ingenuity of unsung women like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer—still agitated many in American society (including many black leaders and “everyday” folk both in the South and around the nation). And while a constructive theologian like J. Deotis Roberts sought, in the last decade of the twentieth century, to “opt for a balance between liberation and reconciliation” while at the same time “invit[ing] others to rethink the meaning of both terms in light of the new challenges in human relations associated with racial and ethnic tensions,” James Cone was asserting that true reconciliation (i.e., that which is an expression of divine liberation) is impossible “unless the creatures of God are [first] liberated from that which enslaves and is dehumanizing.”27 Though Cone contended that he “completely reject[ed] violence as a method for achieving justice in the United States,” he was not “prepared to advise blacks to listen to white Christians and other moralists as they urge the victims to be nonviolent and passive in the face of the violence of whites . . . who are in no moral position to request nonviolence of their victims.”28 And Roberts concurred: “There can be no real reconciliation between blacks and whites henceforth without liberation.”29 In all of this it must be considered as well that the deeply religious and pragmatically nonviolent commitments expressed during the Civil Rights years veiled paradoxical clusters of armed resistance that protected those who insisted, theologically and/or politically, on nonviolent struggle. In this regard see Charles E. Cobb, Jr.’s This Nonviolent Stuff ’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Duke University Press, 2016) and Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York University Press, 2013).

Defining the political in African American theological production: the black church at the center It is important to say that every African American theo-ethical consideration of nonviolence, like every other consideration of African American theological production presented above and below, are, fundamentally, political considerations. Politics (or the political) as considered here both encompasses and expands beyond the art and science of government and statecraft. Indeed, the politics of African American theological production (like all politics) extends to include, in a broader sense, the complex ways in which we humans organize our common lives in contexts of differential power among individuals, status groups, communities, nation states, and our natural (geopolitical) environments. Such politics ranges to-and-fro from the private (oikos) to the public (polis) dimensions of human social arrangements, and features innumerable complex and subtle human activities related to overlapping generalized and localized pursuits of power, status, and control (often involving various maneuvers, methods, strategies of persuasion, coercions, intrigues, and collaborations)—and all this for better or worse and all points in between. Indeed, African American theological pursuits (like all other theological pursuits) developed against the backdrop of life’s political contingencies, complexities, tragedies, and promises, which make visits upon every human being no matter where or who we are. Our common human desires for

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

245

safety, security, and protection; for associations with, and belonging to, something that gives purpose and meaning to life; and our desire to be valued and respected by others are real life concerns especially where theological expressions developed by those considered subaltern are concerned. Hence, the theological grammar of African Americans is always defined by political contextuality, that is to say, defined by the particular human situation that gives continuous birth and rise to it. So, in addition to the obvious historical conditions of the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, the Civil Rights, black nationalist, and women’s movements that gave rise to the intellectually disciplined and constructive voicings of, for instance, black liberation and womanist theology from the late 1960s forward, there has always been among some African American Christians, churches, and institutions, a longing to stay woke and current with the (contested) justice and freedom challenges of the times. Indeed, Barbara Savage has rightly noted concerning the relationship between black religion and the realm of the political as variously considered (in this instance by African American men) that [James] Cone’s work had the practical political intent of helping black religious institutions to maintain their political vitality in the age of Black Power. In the same period, the ethicist Gayraud Wilmore, writing in 1973, made historical claims for the existence of a radical Christianity, reaching back to arguments that Carter Woodson had made in the 1920s. He also argued that African Americans were ‘an incorrigibly religious people,’ a claim that E. Franklyn Frazier and Benjamin Mays had opposed for its essentialism, but that Wilmore used to bolster the religion’s credibility at a time when black Christianity was under attack.30

Savage goes on to expand upon the African American socio-theological concern for political and public relevance by noting that in 1982 Cornel West built on the ideas of black Christian intellectuals like Cone and Wilmore to argue for a “prophetic black Christianity with revolutionary potential,” which featured a “progressive approach to Marxism.” And, of course, from within these male-dominated African American Christian circles there emerged, later in the 1980s, the constructive “womanist theology” of Delores Williams, Katie Cannon and Emilie Townes, who (in concert with many others) “challenged and supplemented” earlier works that presented a “masculine bias which permeated so much thought not only about God but about gender and power relations within churches.”31 It perhaps goes unnoticed here that Savage takes great care not to employ the singular term “church” when speaking of the politics of African American religious concerns. This is because, as she and others have rightly noted, there has been (and continues to be) much discussion and debate when speaking of the historical accuracy of a “black church” (or in the past, a “Negro church”) that, as a matter of steadfast commitment, rendered service to the cause of fighting racial (but also gendered, class, and heteronormative) injustice. Paradoxically, many of the most influential and prophetic individuals and institutions of African American struggle and progress emerged from black churches said to have been, and are still today, largely worthy of indictment for being “a problem and a hindrance in the fight against racial inequality.”32

246

Handbook of African American Theology

Yet, no matter one’s view on the matter of black church investment in African American struggle and uplift, it cannot be denied that black churches and institutions which have given rise to African American theological productions of black political resistance and the quest for justice have constituted critical “public spheres” of African American survival and hope. As is well known and powerfully confirmed by scholars of African American religion, such public spheres functioned as veritable “nations with in a nation” or church denominations “with the soul of a nation.” Indeed, African Americans constructed, beginning in the nineteenth century and against continuous tides of injustice and terror wrought against them, more formal denominational “black public” spaces where, as noted by E. Franklin Frazier, “The ‘Invisible Institution’ Merge[d] with the ‘Institutional Church.’ ”33 Even before the emergence of Frazier’s description of the “Negro church” as an agency of social control, economic cooperation, education, political life, and overarching “refuge in a hostile White world,”34 W.E.B. Dubois (in 1897) identified the development of the Negro church as extraordinary, (if not perfect), declaring, “As it is now churches organized among Negros are, for the most part, curiously composite institutions, which combine the work of churches, theaters, newspapers, homes, schools, and lodges. As a social and business institution, the church has had marvelous success and has done much for the Negro people. As a religious institution, also, it has played some part, but needless to say that its many other activities have not increased the efficiency of its function as a teacher of morals and inspirer to the high ideals of Christianity.”35 Notwithstanding the extraordinary and common civic-national features of many African American Christian denominations (Baptist, Methodist, COGIC, Independent, etc.), which have given society some of the very best African American theologians, ethicists and biblical scholars, any social grammar that suggests the existence of a singular and unified “black church” must hear Savage’s caution that such a conception is an illusion and a metaphor that has taken on a life of its own. . . . The term is a political, intellectual, and theological construction that symbolizes unity and homogeneity while masking the enormous diversity and independence among African American religious institutions and believers. Yet the “black church” lives on precisely because it is political and cultural shorthand and an all-purpose stand-in for the dearth of other black institutions, especially in the twentieth century when large institutional responses to racial inequality were required. In reality, black churches elude schemes for national unification or uniformity in programmatic or political approaches, making them ill-suited for coordinated efforts, often even within local settings.36

Savage is right to caution against the political and cultural essentializing of black churches, indeed, against a failure to see the political complexities and subtleties of black churches. Here, too, the work of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham adds important texture to Savage’s caution. Higginbotham has constructively characterized “the church as dialogic model rather than dialectical,37 reorganizing ‘dynamic tension’ in a multiplicity of protean and concurrent meanings and intentions more so than in a

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

247

series of discrete polarities.” Indeed, Higginbotham goes on to rightly contend that “The Black church constitutes a complex body of shifting cultural, ideological, and political significations. It represents a ‘heteroglot’ in the Bakhtinian sense of a multiplicity of meaning and intensions that interact and condition each other. Such multiplicity transcends polarity—thus tending to blur the spiritual and secular, the eschatological and political, and the private and public.”38 Such cautions against essentializing notwithstanding, black churches and the organizations that arise from them have commonly featured (to various degrees) “nations with in a nation” markings that have sought to nourish black survival, that is, the routine spiritual, material, educational, civic, health-related and psychic needs of a race routinely denied equal rights and status as a collective whole. Indeed, what is broadly unifying among African American Christian churches is a sense of seeking to belong to something that offers ultimate meaning and purpose to their distinctively black lives of suffering and hope in the temporal world of the here and now, and for very many African American Christians, in anticipation of life beyond this temporal world. From a literally and symbolically life-and-death standpoint, it has perhaps been pragmatically essential (at particular moments in history) to embrace the grammar of ecclesial social unity (thus, the black church) for the cause of collective black survival, belonging, and flourishing. Yet, to avoid episodes of African American religious tyranny committed upon ourselves, African American theological production must continue to employ a politics of understanding, embracing, and including difference, as such theological production highlights the real complexities of African American religious life (to borrow from Victor Anderson) “beyond ontological Blackness.”39

African American theological production and interlocutor challenges The politics of African American theological production has always faced challenges from a range of social forces and interlocutors from without and from within. From inside and outside the ranks of African American Christianity come concerns, challenges, affirmations, discussions, and debates on a staggering array of issues and subjects. Within the sphere of African American theological thought in the academy, leading womanist theologians and ethicists have themselves needed to respond to charges of employing a too Christocentric (or even Christian, period) cast, which (among other things) renders African, Afro-Caribbean and other African diasporic religious traditions absent as pathways to lives that are meaningfully holistic.40 African American womanists have in some important ways responded to such a challenge, declaring that indeed womanist theologies speak out of the distinctive social-historical contexts from which the speaker comes, whatever that context might singularly or eclectically be. Indeed, Gay L. Byron and Vanessa Lovelace (in agreement with many other womanist scholars) contend “that womanism is an ethnically and culturally situated but not bounded perspective that allows for black and other women of color who self-identify as womanist.”41

248

Handbook of African American Theology

Hebrew Bible scholar Nyasha Junior, in her volume An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation, has set off fierce discussion about what she sees as a problematic indiscriminate use of “womanist” nomenclature in diverse religious scholar circles. In an attempt to “to reframe womanist biblical interpretation,” Junior (who explicitly does not self-identify as a womanist) wishes to advance a central argument that “The acknowledgment of the importance of womanist scholarship may be the central way that biblical studies engages womanist work even if it is not labeled womanist or offered by an African American women scholar.”42 Moreover, drawing on earlier sentiments by constructive theologian Monica Coleman, she contends that “If womanist biblical scholarship remains ‘of black women, by black women, and for black women,’ it will remain on the margins of biblical scholarship.”43 Junior suggests that whatever truths have been codified concerning the epistemological and methodological soundness of womanist approaches in womanist/feminist fields outside biblical scholarship, there is currently not a distinctive, coherent, womanist approach to biblical interpretation.44 Biblical scholars Gay Byron and Vanessa Lovelace have cautioned the novice reader of Junior’s perspective to understand that hers “is an introduction to both the use of feminist and womanist approaches across disciplines rather than a generative example of womanist biblical interpretation,” while Katherine Doob Sakenfeld has noted Junior’s justifiable attention to the “still quite small” body of biblical scholarship selfidentified as womanist and to the more significant political question of “whether womanist scholarship must be based in personally lived experience and thus can be done only by African American women.”45 Other interlocutors engaged with African American theological production include those who have trumpeted the death (that is, the growing socio-political irrelevance) of the black church, with some going so far as to seriously contest any ultimate benefit of a theological allegiance to Christian theism in the service of black survival and flourishing. Certainly, Savage reminds us that Carter G. Woodson apparently considered some black churches to be “progressive and community oriented” while criticizing all black churches with a “broad brush since it seemed to him that good churches were few and far between.”46 And in recent years, the black church (“as we’ve known it or imagined it”) was declared by the religion scholar Eddie Glaude, Jr. to be dead. While indeed conceding that “Of course many African Americans still go to church,” Glaude was forwarding the thesis that The idea of a black church standing at the center of all that takes place in a community has long since passed away. Instead, different areas of black life have become more distinct and specialized—flourishing outside of the bounds and gaze of black churches. I am not suggesting that black communities have become wholly secular; just that black religious institutions and beliefs stand alongside a number of other vibrant non-religious institutions and beliefs.47

Glaude made his provocative case (while many others clapped back) that such a state of affairs owed its genesis to several interrelated factors: the common myths about black churches as (necessarily) “prophetic and progress institutions” that have run up against conservative pastors and congregations; the reality that more African Americans

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

249

now attend the churches (or cathedrals) of mega-pastors; and a problematic routinization of black prophetic witness, which amounts to backward leaning nostalgia in the present for a black church which once was a political and social rock of African American racial survival, deep belonging and prophetic witness. Standing in the shadows of the observations forwarded by Woodson and Glaude have been African American intellectuals who seriously question the wisdom, rationality and psychic health of an African American insistence upon holding on tight to Christian faith at all. Here, challenges questioning the “intrinsic goodness and justice of God” as pro-black liberator, righteous sustainer, and redeemer in a time of trouble have been powerfully disputed in, for example, W.E.B. Dubois’s “A Litany of Atlanta” (“Done at Atlanta, in the Day of Death, 1906”)48; William R. Jones’s Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology; Anthony B. Pinn’s Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (esp. chapter 4, “What if God Were One of Us,” pp. 154–85), The End of God-Talk: An African American Humanist Theology, and finally, Writing God’s Obituary: How a Good Methodist Became a Better Atheist. Jones and Pinn, in particular, call for a theological abandonment of African American Christian theism as a resource for effectively addressing the ultimate concerns of black political, economic, social, and psychic flourishing against the forces of white supremacy. What is being called for and embraced instead are kinds of humanistic thesim and theology grounded and guided by the innate capacities and recourses of human reason, imagination, and creativity. Today increased focus on “Political Theology” has produced interesting and constructive theological discussions among African American and other religious scholars. For example, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study hosted a conference focused on Theology and Black Politics under the theme “Black Political Theology: Resurrection Rather Than Death.” This conference was organized by Villanova University religion professor Vincent Lloyd, one of the country’s leading scholars of race and political theology. The conference gathered together a number of scholars specializing in African American Religion. With an opening question focused on the perpetual question, “What is the Black Church?,” those gathered discussed and debated a rich (and quite extended) set of significant theological concerns such as “the nature of black politics and theology”; the notion of the black church as “an analytical category that picks out an amalgamation of religious thought and practice conceived in 7–8 historical denominations of Afro-Protestantism”; “theological interventions [against the ‘idolatry of white Christianity’] that have been embodied through practical knowledge and skills of leadership and organization scarcely available to working class blacks in dominant society”; the importance of the distinction to be made between “black theology and black liberation theology”; the “significance of other sites of bonding [beyond black churches] such as familial formations, gender norms, inter alia, and how they in turn influenced black political life”; an interrogation of “the black church through the optic of queer or colour theory”; “ ‘African American vanguardism’ against the inflow of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean”; concerns about “the post-racial prosperity gospel espoused by a growing number of black megachurches”; the problematizing of “neo-liberalism as a colonial reconfiguration in which liberal promises re-enchant racism through new forms of ‘Obama tokenism’ and

250

Handbook of African American Theology

selective class mobility,” and the concomitant silence of a “black intelligentsia which openly benefits from colonial liberal privilege as the ‘New Patriots’ ”; looking beyond black political theology’s “New World provincialization towards a more global outlook,” which engages non-Christian, global theological movements, such as Islam and critical forms of orthodox revival”, this is to say, “third world” concerns that “dovetail with the black church’s mission to un-tie western hegemonic forms.” Of course, with regard to concerns that are global/transnational in an increasingly tight-knit and instantaneously communicative world, African American theological productions of the “first world” (no matter the social grammar under which it is developed and articulated) must (as it has from the time of its formal academic inception in the late 1960s and early 70s) continue to dialogue with theological constructions as varied as feminista, Latin American Liberation, Latinx, mujerista, Amer-Indian, Minjung, Dalit, Inculturation, African women’s, and varieties of other theo/religious productions throughout the continents of the known world. Indeed, African American theological production must continually redouble efforts to confront global-transnational forms of human violence and neglect that are as far afield, yet inextricably connected, as spiritual doubt and warfare, inchoate mental health services, police murders, poverty, mass incarceration, drone strikes, unjust trade policies and practices, obsessive civil surveillance, decrepit schools, unemployment, political xenophobia and demagoguery, land occupations, forced migrations, the corporate commodification of human life, medical apartheid, ecological catastrophe, lynching trees, rape camps, torture cells, and the diamond-studded lives of plutocrats whose lives of wealth and power have been formed by the suffering weight of the world. Here in the United States today much African American theological effort already shows numerous signs of robust engagements/encounters with the distinctive concerns impacting black life. Indeed, increasing numbers of African American theologians, ethicists, biblical scholars and others are constructively engaged with today’s Hip Hop culture, millennials or Gen-Xers, trans-persons and spectacles of trans-terror, nongender binary persons, homophobia and heterosexism, the massification of incarceration, and (of course) the political and cultural super-phenomenal hashtags of protest, which have become diffuse and decentralized movements for social change: #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #EverywhereFerguson, #BlackGirlMagic, #BlackTransMagick, #WeStandWithCharlottesville, Me Too. Indeed, our now thickly-layered hashtag nation presents a comprehensive political sphere online social life, inside of which African American theological production engages and presents a variety of virtual voices, insights, challenges and hopes, which have serious consequences for the quality of human life and history.

An ending: the miseducation of the black seminarian Within the thickly layered political context of all that has been offered above, I conclude with a cautionary word about the state of theological training for African American students, tying the past to the present. Much formal African American theological training today happens outside of predominantly black schools of theological

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

251

instruction and formation. And as such, there is a persistent concern that has been voiced as far back as the time of Carter G. Woodson’s writing more than three-quarters of a century ago. Woodson understood well that much African American theological training suffered from the pedagogical incompetencies of predominantly white schools of theology and divinity that trained African Americans across a wide range of theological disciplines. As early as 1933, Woodson flagged this concern when he argued in The Mis-Education of the Negro that In schools of theology, Negros are taught the interpretation of the Bible as worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro almost to the point of starvation. Deriving their sense of right from this teaching, graduates of such schools can have no message to grip the people whom they have been ill trained to serve.49

A significant concern today is the extent to which something like Woodson’s observation rings true today among young African American seminarians who harbor serious concerns about the abilities of white schools of theology to train them adequately for service in black communities and the wider society and world. African American seminarian Richard N. Williams has made this concern clear in a 2015 essay written for the Christian news magazine Sojourners entitled “The Mis-Education of the Negro Seminarian.” Here Williams says of predominantly white schools of theology that “For purposes of appearing inclusive, white-led seminaries market themselves to black students as having the necessary resources to train them to achieve their vocational calling. Unfortunately, as evidenced by insensitively to the black experience and continued perpetuation of white-washed curriculums, these institutions lack the basic understanding of the needs of black seminarians.”50 This essay has sought to provide a necessarily non-exhaustive intersecting glimpse into the political, ethical, and public life that accompanies and grounds various grammars and presentations of African American theological production. Indeed, African American theological production has always had to (and continues to) emerge within, contend within, respond within, grapple within, liberate and/or endure within quite fluid, complicated, and always morphing political contexts featuring many varieties of intersectional voices, challenges and life-affirming hopes. From both within and beyond such theological production addresses distinctive contexts of existence, which are politically public and private, communal and trans/national, and multiple in terms of its hearers and responders—and all of this, ultimately, in celebration of our collective Love, Supremely.

Notes 1 2

Gayraud S. Wilmore, “General Introduction,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979, eds. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), 2. Wilmore, “General Introduction,” 2.

252 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

Handbook of African American Theology Originally known as the National Committee of Negro Churchmen (NCNC), then the National Committee of Black Churchmen in 1967 ahead of becoming (in 1972) the National Conference of Black Churchmen as cited in the organizational list provided by Wilmore, the NCBC has included both men and women. Eventually a proposal was accepted to rename the organization the National Conference of Black Christians. Wilmore, “General Introduction,” 2. Wilmore, “General Introduction,” 2. See, for example, Peter J. Paris and Julius Crump (eds.), African American Theological Ethics: A Reader (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2015), xv–xx. J. Deotis Roberts, A Black Political Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 15. Roberts, Black Political Theology, 16. Gay Byron and Vanessa Lovelace offer a reminder concerning the similarity and distinction to be made between womanism and black feminism: “we maintain that although womanists and black feminists share a common cultural and historical heritage and certain political concerns, womanism and black feminism are not interchangeable; indeed marking the distinctions between the two is an ongoing debate among feminist and womanist critics (West 2006). They ‘favor’ each other, to use a common family metaphor (Phillips 2006); but in contrast to womanism, feminism is still generally regarded as the ‘universal’ experience of white women, which invariably leads to inequitable power dynamics that are often too difficult to overcome and best expressed in the classic text on black women’s studies by Gloria T. Hall, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982).” See Byron and Lovelace’s “Introduction: Methods and the Making of Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics,” in Gay Byron and Vanessa Lovelace, eds., Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse (Leiden: Brill; SBL/Semeia Studies, 2016), 8. Also see and cf. Traci West, “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist? Marking the Distinctions and Defying Them: A Black Feminist Response” in Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (ed.), Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society (New York; New York University Press, 2006), 291–5; and Layli Phillips, The Womanist Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006). For a definition of womanist, see Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1983). Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M. Townes and Angela D. Sims, eds., Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), xv. See Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought (1989)” in The African American Studies Reader, 2nd edn., ed. Nathaniel Norment, Jr. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007), 214–17. Collins, “Social Construction,” 22. Primary source, Katie G. Cannon, “The Emergence of a Black Feminist Consciousness,” in Feminist Interpretations of the Bible ed. Letty M. Russel (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 30. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The ‘Loves’ and ‘Troubles’ of African-American Women’s Bodies: The Womanist Challenge to the Cultural Humiliation and Community ambivalence,” in Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M. Townes and Angela D. Sims, eds. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 85.

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

253

15 See, for example, Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” and Theressa Hoover, “Black Women and the Churches: Triple Jeopardy,” in Black Theology Volume I, ed. Wilmore and Cone, 368–76 and 377–97. 16 Here Townsend Gilkes is drawing upon Patricia Hill Collins’s epistemological conception of African American women as the “outsiders within” as articulated in Collins’s important essay, “Learning from the Outsiders Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33 no. 6 (1986): 14–31. Townsend Gilkes favorably quotes Hill Collins’s contention that black women’s subordinate position in the political economy is one of “contradictory location,” where “Domestic work allowed African-American women to see white elites, both actual and aspiring, from perspectives largely obscured from Black men and from these groups [of white women] themselves.” See Townsend Gilkes, “The ‘Loves’ and ‘Troubles’ of African-American Women’s Bodies,” 86 and Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 11. 17 Eboni Marshall Turman, “Black Women’s Faith, Black Women’s Flourishing, The Christian Century, February 28, 2019: https://www.christiancentury.org/article/ critical-essay/black-women-s-faith-black-women-s-flourishing 18 Cannon, Townes, and Sims, Womanist Theological Ethics, xvi. 19 Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” 844. Grant’s proclamation here tracks well with the communal wisdom and solidarity voiced in “What We Believe,” section 2, in the 1977 Combahee River Statement of black feminists, reprinted in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge Press, 63–70) and accessible online: https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/ files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf (accessed October 24, 2018.) See and cf. FYF100 Blog’s succinct definitions of womanism and black feminism, https:// beyondthemoment.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Why-Black-Feminism2.pdf (accessed October 28, 2017). 20 Quoted in Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” 841. Also see Cone, “Black Ecumenism and the Liberation Struggle,” delivered at Yale University, February 16–17, 1978 and Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church, May 22, 1978. 21 Turman, “Black Women’s Faith, Black Women’s Flourishing.” 22 See, for example, Cannon, Townes and Sims, Womanist Theological Ethics; Marcia Y. Riggs and James Samuel Logan, eds., Ethics That Matters: African, Caribbean, and African American Sources (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012); Paris and Crump (eds.), African American Theological Ethics. 23 See William R. Jones, “Divine Racism: The Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology/James Cone: God, Champion of the Oppressed,” in African American Religious Thought: An Anthology, ed. Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 850–1. 24 James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (New York: Lippincott, 1970), 120–1. 25 Although I expand William R. Jones’s observations about suffering and theodicy to include all African American theological production, he himself was making this argument in the context of the black male’s theological claims that God is a liberating champion of the oppressed. In particular, he cites Cone’s contention that “The point of departure for black theology is the question, How do we dare speak of God in a suffering world . . . in which blacks are humiliated because they are black? This question . . . occupies the central place in our theological perspective.” See Jones, “Divine Racism/ James Cone,” 850. Primary source, James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 115.

254

Handbook of African American Theology

26 Giving her life to the Methodist faith and the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage (among other causes), Truth, in 1844, joined the Northampton Massachusetts Association of Education and Industry, an organization which supported pacifism; she also helped recruit black soldiers for the Union Army during the Civil War. 27 See J. Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology, 2nd edn. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), xiv, and Cone’s essay “Black Theology on Revolution, Violence, and Reconciliation,” in his Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 38–9. 28 James H. Cone, Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1986), 65–6. 29 Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology, 20. 30 Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard: 2008), 272. Savage notes that Cone’s conception of a distinctive “black theology” was a conceptual move resisted by Benjamin Mays in the 1930s. None the less, as she rightly notes, “Cone’s work rearticulated a long-standing ethos of liberation in Black religious thought, expressed across many centuries through spirituals and sermons and in the writings of a long line of black religious intellectuals.” 31 Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, 272. 32 Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, 20, also see esp. chapter 1, “The Reformation of the Negro Church,” where Savage explores the question of whether black churches, as “pivotal institutions in black communities . . . were an impediment or an implement for the political progress of the race.” 33 E. Franklin Frazier and C. Eric Lincoln, The Negro Church in America/The Black Church Since Frazier (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 33. 34 Frazier and Lincoln, The Negro Church in America, chapter 3; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 7–13; Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “Of the Black Church and the Making of a Black Public,” African American Religious Thought: An Anthology, ed. Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 338–65. 35 Philip S. Foner, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks, 1890–1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 97. 36 Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, 9. 37 Cf. Hart Nelsen and Anne Kusener Nelsen’s “The Dialectical Model of the Black Church” as summarized in C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, eds., The Black Church in the American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 10–16. 38 Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 16. 39 Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay On African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995; Bloomsbury Academic Edition, 2016). 40 See, for example, Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008); Monica A. Coleman, “Must I be a Womanist.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Volume 22, Number 1, Spring 2006: 85–96. 41 Byron and Lovelace, “Introduction,” 8. 42 Nyasha Junior, An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 129. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 113–16.

Ethics, Politics, and Civic Engagement

255

45 Gay Byron and Vanessa Lovelace, “Introduction,” and Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, “Challenged and Changed,” in Byron and Lovelace, eds., Womanist Interpretations of the Bible, 7 and 349. 46 Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, 49. Cf. primary source as cited by Savage, “Negro History Association Holds Successful Meeting in New York,” New York Age, November 14, 1931. 47 Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “The Black Church is Dead.” Huffpost: The Blog Updated August 23, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eddie-glaude-jr-phd/the-black-church-isdead_b_473815.html (accessed October 17, 2017.) For the terms of what I will term a landslide of responses to Glaude, see the following example of representative dialogue between Glaude and representative religious, theological, biblical, ministerial and general audience interlocutors sponsored by Columbia University’s Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice (CARSS): “Is the Black Church Dead? A Roundtable on the Future of Black Churches,” which was introduced online as follows: “During the first few months of 2010 a new, yet familiar, debate broke out about the role of black churches in the United States. What began as a provocative article on the Huffington Post elicited a wide range of responses from religious leaders around the country, ignited an online dialogue among academics, and sparked a plethora of essays across the blogosphere. These exchanges inspired a series of interviews on NPR, and, ultimately, the dialogue was featured in the New York Times.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r8Djfxu1Bk (accessed October 17, 2017.) 48 W.E.B. Dubois, On Religion, Phil Zuckerman, ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 65–7. 49 Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (New York: Tribeca Books, 2013), 9. 50 Richard N. Williams, “The Mis-Education of the Negro Seminarian,” Sojourners, March 19, 2017.

19

The Church and the Tangent: Everybody’s Protest Theology Matthew V. Johnson

Introduction In the black church, there was an instinctual and, I think, essentially correct existential recoil from the repetition, albeit explicit, of the white, albeit implicit, hypostatization and elevation of something finite to the level of the infinite. That is to say, there was an adverse reaction in the church to elevating the notion of race, however well intended or apparently revolutionary, to an essential characteristic of the Divinity or an essential theological principle. In a sense the black church reacted negatively to black theologians creating and imposing on the black church an explicit version of the implicit theological flaw accurately identified in the white church and its theology. What black theology did do well was to point out the continuing hypocrisy and complicity of the American Christian church in the oppression of black people. It did so with a new and attractive lexicon that would be codified by later generations of seminarians and adopted as a common language for speaking about the same old problems and shortcomings in the American Christian church and society. But oppression was hardly new to black people. Nor did the average or even illiterate black person in the South, or anywhere else in America, need to be told they were suffering because of white racial oppression; that the white Christian church was shamefully and evasively hypocritical, or even that God was on their side. From the night riding horror of the Ku Klux Klan in the South to the badge wearing terrors of Northern police brutality, black people were painfully aware of their oppression. They did not need black theologians to make them aware of their pain or how horrible it often was to be black in America or how full of joy and life. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin writes of the twisted light emerging from the racially refracted field of Christian morality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin that ensnares the would-be freed person and her advocates by the rhetoric of their own striving: They spurned and were terrified of the darkness, striving mightily for the light; and considered from this aspect, Miss Ophelia’s exclamation, like Mrs. Stowe’s novel, achieves a bright, almost lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of Negro

258

Handbook of African American Theology

oppression written in our own, more enlightened day, all of which say only: “This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”1

James Baldwin argues in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” that, while Uncle Tom’s Cabin and indeed most protest literature may function well as effective pamphlets decrying the horrors and terror of the institution of slavery and, by extension, Jim Crow and other institutional outcroppings of racism, they did not function well as novels. Likewise, there is a difference between the shock value of an existentially counter-factual jeremiad and a fundamental or systematic theology upon which the existential coherence and the theo-spiritual integrity of the church is supposed to rest and ultimately must. Writes Baldwin, of Ms. Stowe in the avatar of spokesperson for the oppressed, “She was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction.”2 The challenge of black theology was and is how not to be, become, or remain, just another instantiation of “everybody’s protest theology.” Black theology established itself from its inception as primarily a theology of, and in a sense “for,” protest. It was not so much a theology of, by, and for the black church but rather a theological apologetic for a culturally emergent dimension of the Black Power movement as it took ideological shape in the socio-political tumult of the late 1960s and 1970s.3 To the degree that black theology was an expression of protest theology in response to a particular ideology of the time, it was indeed a theology of black power, but not necessarily a theology of the black church. It was clearly an attempt, in large part, to answer challenges from some of the more strident voices within the black community concerning the relevance of the black church to the ongoing struggle for African American freedom in particular and the emerging life of the African American community in general. In so responding, it seemed at least implicitly to affirm the legitimacy of the critiques about which many church leaders had legitimate theological and practical concerns. This initial preoccupation set and determined its future trajectory and its relationship to the black church. The initial orientation established both its enabling and constraining dimensions. It established both its fruitfulness and its limitations. The limitations were both theological and practical. Ironically it guaranteed its centrality in black academic theological discourse while at the same time securing its marginality in the church. Interestingly, neither its centrality in academic theological discourse nor its marginality in the black church is unambiguous. The main focus of this essay is black theology’s relationship to the black church and both of its dimensions, the enabling and limiting, on African American religious life.

The Divine, racialized theology, and idolatry Whiteness, and by implication white supremacy, as the ultimate reference point for and arbiter of all value, whether consciously or unconsciously, occupies a position of ultimacy; a status reserved exclusively for the transcendent in any authentically

The Church and Protest Theology

259

Christian vision of life. This renders whiteness essentially an idolatry. It is the worship of the white self in the form of a god in its own image, reflecting its primacy and validating whiteness with its cultural manifestations as the baseline criterion for authentic or essential humanity. In it lie the seeds of a pervasive atheistic humanism which ironically many of the most vociferous proponents of white conservative evangelicalism, steeped in this implicit form of white supremacy, identify as their own penultimate enemy. If white supremacy is the point of reference, then asserting blackness as an alternative vision reinforces the overarching racialized discourse that has as its assumptive foundation white supremacy and its sequela of categorical valuations that black theologians presume to be fighting. The ontologizing and ultimately divinization of race with the implicit acceptance of it as a necessarily permanent feature of the human journey through time would be a particularly egregious example. Fighting white supremacy with more racialized discourse that, in effect, replaces one racial object as the reference point for ultimacy in place of another reinforces white supremacy by at root affirming the categorical structure on which the discursive apparatus of racial oppression rests. The pursuit of liberation by this rhetorical and methodological strategy is the theological equivalent of tilting at windmills. Sound and fury, giving vent to profound spiritual frustrations and providing an ideological refuge for the destabilized spiritual identity of many troubled black Christian academics, but was hardly a satisfying theological strategy or effective solution to the set of challenges facing the rank-and-file African American Church, the church at large, or our world.4 The black church clearly rejected that dimension of the black theological project while agreeing with some of black theology’s more insightful disclosures about the relationship between African American Christianity and black suffering, as well as its critique of white Christian hypocrisy and participation in racial oppression. Of course, none of this was new to black people. In effect what black theology seemed to be asking for was the complete transformation of soteriology. It seemed to, and indeed does, ask that the black church collapse its theological claim on eternal life and hope in Heaven to the ideological project of the Black Power movement. It articulated this theological thrust by adopting the common critique of what black theologians identify as conservative black Christianity as primarily an “opiate of the people.” It rests basically on the thesis that the Christian faith dupes “the people” into patiently enduring and accepting the systemic reality of oppression in this life for the promise of a better life in the world to come. Thus, they made one of the most cherished convictions of practicing black Christians, a belief that has helped African Americans to make the unbearable bearable since the inception of the “invisible institution,” theologically anathema. In addition, black theology articulated a monolithic and intellectually elementary understanding of historic African American religious experience that contradicted the commonsense embrace of the meaning of the phrasing of commonly held religious beliefs and reduced them to little more than a cloak for talk about earthly liberation. This cleared the path for black theologians to make the claim that authentic black faith has always been about the agenda that black theology affirmed as the heart of “black faith”; that is, in so much as there was an actual agenda in black theology beyond the rhetorical reframing of black Christian soteriology around a vaguely defined concept

260

Handbook of African American Theology

of liberation. Aside from being suspiciously close to a simplistic reduction of authentic and multi-leveled religious experience to the monolithic goal of “liberation” (however that might be construed), it also made very serious methodological and philosophical anthropological assumptions that the movement was either unwilling or incapable of discussing or defending. I will return to this point later.

Black theology and the black church This attack on cherished and deeply held convictions, alongside the hermeneutically reductive attack on the spiritual integrity of the practicing black church which did not discover its primary spiritual meanings in racially oriented protest, did little to endear the black theology project to the rank and file in black churches. While it may have appealed to the intellectual appetites of some young seminarians, activists and academics who were desperately in need a theological language to express their burgeoning social consciousness, to frame their political praxis and their desire for a free space of their own in the academy, black theology did little to nothing to speak to the reality of daily life for the average literate African American Christian. There is a lot of life left to live when people put the placards down. Even second generation attempts to push a more Afrocentric orientation did not really reflect the consciousness of the black church as the poor reception continued to plague works like Will Coleman’s Tribal Talk, where he attempts to articulate a conceptual scheme for largely translating facets of black religious life into an “Africanized” rhetorical grid.5 Again, this orientation may have an appeal to a particular niche of the academic Brahmin class or black religious literati; but by suggesting, on a gut level, a capitulation to the critiques of the black church as somehow deeply skewed and misdirected in its self-conscious spirituality, it fails to make a connection with the African American rank and file. There is a particularly disclosive irony in all of this, and it has to do with the degree to which black theology in its untested and poorly vetted philosophical and methodological assumptions continues to reproduce some of the more seductive and, for that reason, particularly egregious errors of theological and philosophical liberalism. Hence, I believe, it therefore helps to reproduce the conditions of oppression. One such assumption is a romanticizing of “the people” with its concomitant assumption that consciousness is transparent to itself.6 The black church is a historical institution, made up of people deeply embedded in their time and circumstance. The black church is not an ideal abstract concept. It is not an institution that stands over against the community; it is a community made up of and reflecting the oppressed people within it. Consequently, the black church cannot escape or be expected to operate in some abstract ethereal realm untroubled by all the malicious factors that contaminate the field in which African American intersubjectivity is constituted. If African American experience was anything near as traumatic as much of the more existentially astute literature implies, there is simply no way African Americans could escape a profound and pervasive toxification requiring a far more nuanced and restrained analysis of the religious experience implied in black theology’s treatment of the black church experience as a resource for doing theology.7 In a word

The Church and Protest Theology

261

you don’t have the liberating (or complicit) black church over against the black community but rather a black church that reflects the community of which it is an organic institutional outcropping. The implicitly atomistic conception of an aggregate of individuals living by some strictly identifiable self-conscious belief system or conceptual scheme is hopelessly insufficient for understanding the consciousness (inclusive of the theological unconscious) of the black church or the spiritually formative dynamics at work in the experience.8 It is incumbent on any theology that claims African American religious experience as a source or epistemological norm to be more methodologically self-conscious at the foundational level. Yet this anthropological assumption clearly plagued first and second generation black theologians, seriously skewing their understanding of both the black church and the oppressive field in which black religious consciousness takes shape as a significant but not unambiguous adaptation. The consequent hypostatization of the black church obscured in the codification of an abstract belief system affirming a theologically informed political praxis committed to liberation (again, however that is construed) becomes conflated with the classic liberal romanticized, profoundly problematic investment of “the people” with spiritual superpowers that are incommensurate with an appropriate appreciation of the African American’s existential predicament. It becomes but another ideological iteration of classic liberal optimism that occludes appropriate social analysis and critique. What is theologically significant here is the profoundly problematic relationship of this conceptual apparatus and its concomitant sequelae to fundamental theological notions that are essential to the faith of the black church and classic systematic theology such as “original sin” which is left unarticulated or explored. The concept of “original sin” has everything to do with the subsequent elaboration of the meaning of redemption which is key not only to the concrete black church but also to where James Cone seems to be trying to go in his latest work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, in the wake of other African American theological pathfinders with which he is clearly familiar but whom he fails to properly acknowledge.9 The black church and the black theology project were ill served by this flawed estimate of the black church suggesting that it was anything less than thoroughly integrated into the overlapping fields of power and socio-cultural dynamics that constitute the larger social whole. This methodologically operative assumption, grounded in an uninterrogated romantic holdover from black theology’s liberal theological heritage, left the black church theologically vulnerable to the spiritual corruption embedded in the texture of late consumer capitalist society. The romanticized notion of “the people” which, in this case, was rendered rather arbitrarily as “black people” combined with the drive to distinguish the black Christian church from the white Christian church to create an ambiguous but significant methodological blind spot in the black theology project. There is no doubt but that the two manifestations of the Christian faith are different and distinguishable due to African heritage, spiritual resources, the existential sequelae that emerge from occupying different locations in the generative socio-cultural grid, etc., but the narrowly historical methodological orientation of black theology prohibited it from developing an appropriately sophisticated and nuanced analysis. In a word, the methodological shortcomings left

262

Handbook of African American Theology

far too much of the subterranean spiritual wealth of the black church unmined, unexplored, and unexcavated. Flashes of this theo-spiritual wealth were gleaned from a kind of methodological “panning” in works like James Cone’s Spirituals and the Blues and God of the Oppressed and Dwight Hopkins’s Shoes that Fit our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology, but the real theo-spiritual wealth remained underground.10 Works of this kind perhaps serve best as indications of some places others might dig to unearth the profound spiritual wealth of the black Christian tradition with methodologically sharper drills and more sophisticated tools. I will point out only two related but distinguishable levels at which this limitation impacted black theology’s effectiveness in and relevance to the ongoing life of the black church. They by no means exhaust the relevant issues.

Black liberation and black middle class aspirations The failure of black theology to adequately articulate a vison of liberation has left it open to the charge that the ideal of liberation came to mean little more than the move of African Americans into some version of white middle-class status free of racial impediments to the full exercise of and enjoyment of constitutionally guaranteed endowments. This may or may not have been the intention or assumption of black theologians, but it was certainly the implication. Cornel West accurately argued that this situation left the black theology movement with a set of dead-end trajectories into either history or social ethics, both significantly leading away from theology proper. Lately this notion has expanded to embrace the full range of disparate voices of those “locked out” of the full exercise and enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of equality and has come to be identified with the “progressive” buzz word of inclusion. Yet it is difficult for the average Christian, even in a racially self-conscious black church, to see how the full enfranchisement of fundamentally flawed human persons in institutions that are themselves a reflection of the flawed human predicament signals redemption in any meaningfully Christian sense. That aside, the absence of any other model of what is meant by liberation for most literate African Americans, who would be those most open to the message of black theology, the move into a middle-class status as articulated above seemed to be or rather became the ideal. The emphasis on the poor, notwithstanding, comes to be largely an argument for broadening the opportunity to participate in the fruits of late consumer capitalism. Consequently, without a larger adequately defined notion of liberation, regardless of the problematic relationship it may or may not have to the appropriate place of transcendence in the Christian understanding of redemption, it tends to reinforce the conditions of legitimacy for the system that sustains oppression.11 Given this severely anemic understanding of what amounts to the historical articulation of the human predicament, its relationship to prevailing reality and its implied elan, a curious irony emerges. While posturing ideologically against the socioethical limitations of the theological heresy of the prosperity gospel that has captured the imagination of a large portion of the middle class black church rank and file, black theology actually colluded with its ideological emergence in the black church. What is

The Church and Protest Theology

263

American middle-class status, if it is not the enjoyment of its trappings? What is liberation if it is not the achievement of the status that those trappings render “real” and concrete? Moreover, this predicament is complicated by the prevailing narcissism encouraged by the liberal preoccupation with self-love, an ideology firmly embedded in the vicissitudes of what Phillip Rieff has aptly called the “triumph of the therapeutic.”12 The prevailing materialistic narcissism has plunged significant portions of the black church into a benighted state of twisted piety that works against the legitimate aims and theological norms “prescribed” by black theology at its best. Popular piety in the black church has become suffused with a preoccupation with self-health interpreted in proto-psychological terms that hide behind the veil of “loving yourself ” as an antidote, even a panacea, for black self-hatred. The notion of self-sacrifice necessary for devotion to a transcendent cause which liberation as envisioned by the best of black theology entails, has fallen into, in almost any sense, disrepute. At the root of this shift is a flawed and somewhat shallow psychological critique of traditional theological categories as encouraging a masochistic anti-liberationist spirituality. This “critique” is governed by a norm of health, liberation, or salvation which collapses and is conflated into a kind of soteriological haze that has subtly exchanged a theological for a psychological norm. This is reflected in some womanist critiques in the academy but manifests itself in popular piety in a self-absorbed generalization of a deeply individualized preoccupation with personal pain, effectively atomizing the community and severing the organic connection between personal suffering and the collective experience of oppression.13 The social utility or a (quasi-) psychological assessment of a theological idea should never serve as its primary epistemological criterion.

Anthropological assumptions There is also a critical anthropological assumption at the heart of this flawed vision of human nature and “human fulfillment.” The flawed conception envisions the human self as a container relatively full or empty of reflexive positive sentiment. Hence worship becomes the filling station for good feelings and a healthy self-love effectively subverting the traditional focus on God’s will versus human desire, rendering the worshiper rather than God the center of the liturgical focus. The basic operative assumption in this psychologized spirituality leads to overcompensation characteristic of “bad” narcissism rather than a relatively “healthy” self which all truly moral action presupposes. An alternative vision of the self as damaged in a toxic “field” would focus personal piety outward on a more transformative socio-political praxis. The difference between the two clearly rests on different anthropological assumptions. In the first and flawed model the self is an isolated container relatively full or empty of self-esteem based on the amount of “self-love” it can imbibe. In the second model the manifestation of self-love implicit in much of the popular piety is properly understood as the overcompensation characteristic of a corrupted narcissism (sin) aggravating the situation. Here again this awareness is made possible by shedding the romanticized notion of “the people” and understanding the black church as more organically embedded in the structures of oppression. In the second model, the self is easily envisioned as a part of an overlapping

264

Handbook of African American Theology

culture of interactive fields in which individual selves are constituted in organic relation to each other, social institutions, deeply embedded cultural practices and media including the sequelae of coded signals. Such a model seems far more commensurate with the communal orientation black theology intends, and renders any serious understanding of redemption more amenable to social transformation throughout the field and fields of social life without foreclosure of transcendence. As the black theology project moved deeper into the theological quagmire of a lingering liberal theo-ideological shadow and an easy buy-in into popular secular ideas at both the academic and practical levels which on the surface seem to support its claims and objectives, the project pursued various lines of thought—as indicated above. One other, even more troubling, ideological move with serious theological and ecclesiological implications, tainted by this problematic, is the foray in varying degrees into Afrocentrism in an attempt to find new resources for developing a racially appropriate paradigm for black theology and the black church. The underlying assumption at work here, contrary to black theology’s claim of being of, by, and for black people, seems to be that black people are out of touch with themselves. To the extent that they are out of touch with themselves they remain enslaved to a false consciousness. This self with which they are out of touch is their true self, their African self. By the reclamation of their true identity as African peoples, African Americans reclaim their cultural heritage and take ownership of their true selves. The popular cliché that if you don’t know where you are coming from you can’t know where you are going seemed to necessitate this “revelation.” Hence, operating with a paradigm that clearly echoes individualistic preoccupations with self-fulfillment of the modern therapeutic movement, Afrocentricity became for some the new paradigm of salvation. Salvation in this conception of liberation was psychologized along the lines of typical identity politics with the additional implication that with the achievement of “selfknowledge” one attained a kind of liberation. In addition to the obvious conflation of this prescription for psychological health with a kind of salvation, this becomes but another in a long line of gnostic heresies with which the Church has had to contend since its inception. The idea that “salvation” or in this case “liberation” in a meaningfully Christian sense could come through some form of knowledge clearly smacks of a strangely gnostic psychologism with a sequela of difficulties associated with an implicit individualism for a system that started out with the intent of significant social, i.e. institutional, change. Being able to freely wear Kinte cloth to your office, or church for that matter, may be a “healthy” individual expression of your corporate identity, but it does little to elevate the life of the poor, disturb the balance of political power or significantly redistribute the wealth in late monopoly consumer capitalism.

Description, prescription, and authentic interpretation There is no doubt that the recognition of all aspects of African American heritage is a healthy advance over a benighted cultural ignorance, but it is hardly a theologically secure foundation for a meaningfully Christian soteriology or an acceptable theology for the black church. There is a point at which the black church will respond with deep

The Church and Protest Theology

265

suspicion, and appropriately so, to claims of academic elitists that they know better than the church what it “actually” believes or should believe. I raise this issue for two reasons. One, it clearly demonstrates a fundamental tension, and perhaps ultimately fatal contradiction, in the black theology project, a claim that has seriously obscured and hampered its relation to the black church. The tension inheres in the question whether black theology in any of its iterations is discursive or normative. That is to say, is it trying to describe and clarify what the black church is and believes or is it prescribing for the church what it “ought” to think and believe? The answer to this question clearly has deep methodological implications for its “epistemic” claims and would certainly impact how and if it is received by black church rank and file. Second, and interestingly, black theology has found its most receptive audiences not in the black church but in the white academy and through black caucuses in the white church. I do not think this is incidental. White mainline churches, to which the theologically flawed and often spiritually vacuous issue-oriented Christian liberalism is more endogenous, have had to contend with massive membership hemorrhages as people quietly walk away. The poor reception of black theology in the black church is in many ways, I think, the chiral reflection of the massive membership hemorrhages in white mainline denominations. White seminary bred liberals typically convinced of their own righteousness and mistakenly taking black theology and the proliferation of the “othering” discourses as keys to the vitality of black and other minorities’ religious institutional life seem to be doubling down on their issue-oriented theological approaches as the path to revitalization. Yet, however right one may be on any particular issue, theologians and church leaders can ill afford to translate this or that issue or any array of them into a “practically” exhaustive focus of the meaning of the Faith. It neglects the uniqueness of the authentic religious impulse which is the well spring of all lasting spirituality and, indeed, the church’s stability over time. It is out of this well spring that the fundamental categories of the Christian faith emerge and to which they meaningfully speak. While many see a dramatic display of “concern” in a plurality of voices and stories, as the pathway to the church’s institutional salvation, that fact may be, in fact, an indication of the depth to which the American Church continues in krisis.

The locus and framework for black theology One way the ongoing krisis can be summed up briefly for our purposes is by pointing out the larger framework in which it came to be. Generally, there was something of a surrender of the liberal mainline churches to, first, a brand of scientism, now outdated; second, to a general social ethos that the church’s otherworldly concerns or any concerns not explicitly devoted to improving a person’s lot in life in quantifiable or measurable terms are morally and spiritually suspect, if not outright false. Left-leaning liberal academic theology and various forms of liberal and mainline Christianity have now washed up on the shores of social ethics seeking asylum in a world that no longer trades in supernatural currency for cultural capital. The krisis is made more manifest in the proliferation of specialized and increasingly balkanized “Christian” discourses.

266

Handbook of African American Theology

While the theological discussion profits from a broad range of voices, it is incumbent upon the authentic theological enterprise to provide a larger and common framework and hold it always already in focus.14 While this framework can never be completely homogenous, it must have a universal intentionality to even provide for meaningful theological discussion and the arbitration of competing claims. Indeed, while it may not seem important to liberal leaning academically inclined theologians, or even desirable for that matter, it remains absolutely essential for the preservation of the theological coherence of the believing community and the spiritual integrity of the church. This larger framework with a universalizing intentionality creates the existential space and contextual atmosphere for collaboration on critical ethical issues and the containment of tensions associated with differences, disagreements, and ambiguities, all of which impinge upon the Christian church’s ability to maintain its theological integrity in transcendence amidst shifting historical (ethical) emphases. Without this, an effective praxis becomes extremely difficult at best and impossible at worst. The collapse of theology into social ethics or special interest issues is an invitation to theological imbecility, institutional vulnerability and confusion on a mass scale. With it, the identity of the Christian Church (and its theology) dissolves itself in the proliferation of causes waiting to be championed, as the ethical kaleidoscope of the ages continues to shift, providing different spectral configurations through which we strain to lens our diminishing light. With regard to where theology is found and best done, James Baldwin suggests that is in the acceptance of our humanity: For Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.15

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in Baldwin, James, Collected Essays (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998), 11. Ibid., 12. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, Black Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1980). For an intricate and relevant discussion of the issues involved in history and transcendence see Langdon Brown Gilkey, Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), chapter 2. Will Coleman, Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story” (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

The Church and Protest Theology 6

7

8 9

10

11

12 13 14

15

267

For a telling contextualization and assessment of the embeddedness of this notion of “the people” in the “liberal synthesis” see Stuart I. Rochester, American Liberal Disillusionment in the Wake of World War I (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977). See, for instance, Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Walter Walter, Soul by soul: life inside the antebellum slave market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). See Matthew V. Johnson, The Tragic Vision of African American Rreligion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). I am referencing here the tectonic theological shift James Cone makes by displacing the previous notion of the primacy of Sinai to a more redemption focused assessment of the black church’s theological vision: James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011). See Matthew V. Johnson, “Lord of the Crucified” and James A. Noel, “Were You There” in The Passion of the Lord: African American reflections, ed. James A. Noel and Matthew V. Johnson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood?: The Cross in the African American Experience (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005). See also Johnson, The Tragic Vision. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: an Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). Dwight N. Hopkins, Shoes that Fit our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology (New York: Orbis Books, 1993). For a clear distillation of Cornel West’s basic critique of black theology see Frederick L. Ware, Methodologies of Black Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 83. While I agree with the fundamental elements of West’s critique as outlined by Ware, I am far less sanguine about the “antiracist” prospects of his Marxist response. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007). Delores S. Williams and Katie G. Cannon, Sisters in the Wilderness: the Challenge of Womanist God-talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 36. Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman, in New Theology no. 9 (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 23. For a fuller articulation see J. Robert Nelson, “Toward an Ecumenical Ecclesiology” in Marty and Peerman. For a sampling of the extant liberation theologies available in the American context see Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas and Anthony B. Pinn, Liberation Theologies in the United States: an Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2010). Baldwin, Everybody’s Protest Novel, 18.

References Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998. Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

268

Handbook of African American Theology

Black Theology: A Documentary History: Volume Two: 1980–1992. Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books 1993. Coleman, Will. Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story.” University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000. ——. The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000. ——. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M., and Anthony B. Pinn. Liberation Theologies in the United States: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Gilkey, Langdon Brown. Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History. New York: The Seabury Press, 1976. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenthcentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hopkins, Dwight N. Shoes that Fit our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993. Johnson, Matthew V. The Tragic Vision of African American Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ——. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Litwack, L.F. Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Vintage books, 1988. ——. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Marty, Martin E., and Dean G. Peerman. New Theology no. 9. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Noel, James A., and Matthew V. Johnson. The Passion of the Lord: African American Reflections. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007. Rochester, Stuart I. American Liberal Disillusionment: In the Wake of World War I. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Terrell, JoAnne Marie. Power in the Blood?: The Cross in the African American Experience. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005. Ware, Frederick L. Methodologies of Black Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012. ——. African American Theology: An Introduction. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016. Williams, Delores S., and Katie G. Cannon. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013. Wilmore, Gayraud S., and James H. Cone. Black Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1980.

Part Three

Church, Ministry, and Leadership

20

Prophetic Preaching and Theological Reflection Kenyatta R. Gilbert

The preached Word in black church contexts has long been esteemed for its persistent calls for justice, social reform, moral and ethical responsibility, and spiritual redemption. These commitments have been central to the black church’s identity. Rooted in a rich history that dates back centuries, to a time before the formation of the institutional church, the preacher’s proclamation has functioned as the primary means of theological instruction for congregants. But many a person (of color or not) if asked “How would you describe African American preaching?” would describe this genre of preaching as theatrical, performance-driven, energetic, bombastic, showy, soul-stirring, ornamental, and Jesus-centered. And if persons were to visit any number of black congregations in the United States today as first-timers, their description would not be far afield and perhaps a fair deduction. However, it is more accurate to say that such descriptors are woefully deficient when attempting to obtain an appropriate picture of the nature and function of black preaching. What is often missed is the broad range of techniques, approaches, modes, and styles of preaching that sit under the canopy of the black preaching tradition that contrasts with Eurocentric preaching traditions or preaching practices developed by non-European people groups. Because the wider culture and younger generations of African Americans remain badly informed about what black preaching is, not to mention the essence of its prophetic mode, I have arrived at at least a working definition. So before proceeding, it is important that a fuller picture of the tradition is presented to address deficiencies in understanding. When I use the term African American preaching, I am referring to a ministry of Christian proclamation—a theorhetorical discourse about God’s goodwill toward community with regard to divine intentionality, communal care, and the active practice of hope—that finds resources internal to black life in the North American context. The aspect of this discourse specifically emphasized in this essay is the prophetic dimension—the dimension rooted in the principles of justice and hope that convey an outlook of divine purpose.1

272

Handbook of African American Theology

What is prophetic preaching? Prophetic preaching is spoken Word that begins in supplication and attends to human tragedy to hear God’s revelation, and its procedure for broadcasting what is received to the human audience for whom it is intended. It is “interpretation” that brings clarity to the sacred (God, revealed truth, highest moral values, etc.) and articulates what should be an appropriate human response to the sacred. The preacher who preaches prophetically does not treat social justice (or other sacred values) as something independent from God but rooted in and emanating from God. Accordingly, prophetic preaching is neither imported nor self-generated witness, but is mediated and worked out in community, not in isolation. The common thread of all prophetic preaching traces from the recognition of injustice, and that the preacher will name injustice for what it is, and what justice should be.2 Prophetic preaching has an emancipatory agenda because fundamentally it is sacred discourse about humanization. Homiletic scholars have made inquiries into the nature of prophetic preaching as a form of sociopolitical and sociocultural discourse. European American homileticians such as J. Philip Wogaman and Lenora Tubbs Tisdale have refocused attention on prophetic preaching as central to the pastor’s vocational identity; however, in sum and substance, their works only address this subject matter in a generalized way.3 Still, other scholars have investigated preachers whose sermons address various justice-related themes within the purview of black church worship and black life in general, but none attempt to define prophetic preaching in a context specific way. Works are largely synthetic and foundationalist on the subject. They provide more cultural criticism than they offer new theoretical ground with regard to the distinctive characteristics of prophetic preaching I have noticed in African American church contexts. Therefore, as I see it, this essay’s perspective on the subject respects the postmodern reader in a way others have not. Homiletics is an integrative theological discipline. One implication of this is that homileticians, by and large, shape theory in conversation with their specific area of specialization (e.g., biblical studies, performance studies, poetics, systematic theology, practical theology, liturgics, etc.). Therefore, descriptions abound as each scholar adds a new facet of understanding to homiletic literature. I come to my theory work using practical theology and constructive hermeneutics as a methodological lens. For instance, Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm of the Anabaptist tradition, who is trained in homiletics and New Testament studies, foregrounds the Gospels in her homiletic scholarship. Emory homiletics professor Teresa Fry Brown brings speech communications theory to her work. Homileticians Marvin McMickle and Frank Thomas, former pastors, have earned Ph.D.s in rhetorical studies and, mostly, write from their area of expertise. Narrative preaching theorist Eugene Lowery draws on poetics and Princeton professor of preaching and worship James F. Kay brings his academic preparation in systematic theology to his work in the discipline. Regarding prophetic consciousness and preaching, biblical scholars outside of the discipline have added their perspectives, most notably biblical theologian Walter Brueggeman, a white, Presbyterian male who penned The Prophetic Imagination, a

Prophetic Preaching and Theological Reflection

273

book which, as Old Testament scholar Patrick D. Miller put it, is “one of the most perceptive uncoverings of the prophetic voice in contemporary Old Testament study.”4 In fact, given the enduring influence of his work on the subject, a summary of his project is worth outlining. The focus of the time-honored classic is the prophetic consciousness of Moses, a holy tradition that continues in the work of other biblical prophets and is consummated in Jesus of Nazareth. According to Brueggeman, prophetic preaching is concerned with the rejection of the status quo, speaking words of resistance, a healthy suspicion of power, and selfawareness about the seductive influences of culture. Opposite prophetic consciousness is imperialism, or “royal consciousness,” which Brueggeman finds in the Egyptian empire and the reign of Solomon. While prophetic consciousness promotes an economics of equality, politics of justice, and religion of God’s freedom, royal consciousness, by contrast, reinforces an economics of affluence, politics of oppression, and religion of divine accessibility where God is fully controllable and perceived as the king’s patron. When people locked in an imperial mindset assimilate to the status quo, as Brueggeman explains, critics are silenced, grief is buried, faith identity is lost, and passion withers. And when passion disappears, people develop immunity to the transcendent voices and to concern for one’s neighbor.5 For Brueggeman prophetic preaching is truth-telling about a God who is deeply involved in the world and casts the preacher as textual exegete or “scribe” who probes the scriptures and permits them to be seen with immediacy and force.6

The life world of the Hebrew prophet The calling and task To prompt serious discussion around discovering what lines of continuity exist between the biblical prophet’s message-bearing task and the primary characteristics that have legitimated the prophetic speech of the contemporary preacher, the obvious place to begin an exploration of the role prophetic preaching has played within Christian communities in general and African American churches and communities in particular, is the social world of the Hebrew prophet. Jeremiah’s biographical portrait is paradigmatically useful for thinking about the call of the Hebrew prophet and the prophet’s social environment. In the opening verses of Jeremiah, the word of God comes to the prophet Jeremiah saying, Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations. Jer. 1:5

Ironically, though appointed prophet over the nations, no reference in the narrative suggests that the prophet was called to a ceremonial office to sit and adjudicate the daily goings-on of the people. Rather, the call of the prophet is accompanied by a

274

Handbook of African American Theology

message-bearing license to go and speak to a world that has rejected God. This is theologically significant because the divinely appointed prophet is assigned to a task, not an office. Moreover, Amos, the agriculturalist turned prophet, recognized his call apart from Israel’s established guilds and schools for prophecy. While tending his flock, he declared to Amaziah that the Lord spoke to him, “Go and prophesy to my people Israel” (Amos 7:14-15). A second thing to note is that a task(s) always accompanies the prophet’s call. Jeremiah is called to the task of what Walter Brueggeman calls evoking an alternative community, which involved the prophet offering a different view of reality within Israel’s contextualized history, in light of their cries and God’s promise to enact freedom and justice on their behalf.7 Therefore, the declaration, “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:10), clearly entails a commission to speak powerful words derived from a reality reframing God. It is God who performs the very word sent by the messenger to a fragmented community, which in Jeremiah’s case set itself to fight against whatever God decreed. The prophet Ezekiel, in a similar narrative, receives a vision instructing him to stand to his feet and go to Israel. The Word of the Lord that came to him declared, “Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them” (Ezek. 2:5). As the pericope unfolds, akin to the Jeremiah narrative, a warning call to proclaim the Word of God in fearlessness in the face of rejection and ridicule is issued from God to Ezekiel. Typical of the prophetic call, however, is some degree of protest from the recipient of the call. Jeremiah’s complaint comes to a climax in chapter 20, “O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed . . . I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me” (Jer. 20:7). Despite this, the instruction to the prophet was to speak God’s Word whether they heard or refused to hear, but as noted in Jeremiah 1:19, accompanying the prophet’s calling and task is God’s promise, which claimed, “They will fight against you; but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you.”

The prophetic agenda Through acts of utterance prophets were raised up to engage life-and-death matters, carrying the divine response into material reality. With exclamations of justice, ecclesiastical reform, moral and ethical responsibility, and redemptive hope, through the human channel of prophetic mediation, God addressed God’s people, as prophets pointed to events in which God was at work and told why God was active in them. For example, Jeremiah and Ezekiel’s call narratives are comprised of vision reports of future occurrences and night visions. Hence, the context of the prophet’s social world was intrinsically related to the prophet’s prescient task. The prophet’s cosmological surroundings constituted the arena for prophetic demonstration. Functioning within particular sociocultural boundaries, as spiritual intercessors for the community, prophets assumed the insufferable task of proclaiming divine justice that criticized the corruption of the established government and the idolatrous practices of temple

Prophetic Preaching and Theological Reflection

275

worship. Jeremiah, Elijah, Jonah, Moses, and Ezekiel were each called into communities who resisted their speech and opposed their work. First, as God’s mediatorial messengers dispatched from the divine council, the nucleus of the prophet’s agenda was to function as the divine government liaison to the human government. In Jeremiah’s “Temple sermon” (7:1-15) he pronounces God’s indictment upon “shepherds [i.e., the religious leaders and monarchial leadership] who have scattered the sheep” because of their evil doings. The temple is the setting that shows the profound tension that existed in the political cosmology of the covenant community. In this case, God’s judgment is brought to bear on the dysfunctional state of temple worship. Words received at the council always preceded the prophet’s authorization to act in spaces of temporality. As Jeremiah’s biography illustrates, the truth-bearing task of the biblical prophet secured him a kind of clout, but the consent to speak the divine Word remained contingent upon the prophet’s access to the divine assembly or council of God. And while mostly met with an ungracious reception, in Jeremiah’s circumstance as recorded in Jeremiah 23:16-18, where he denounces the false prophets of hope, he understood that his prophetic broadcasting was answerable to some authority. Second, the prophet proclaimed God’s justice and the terms of the covenant. Again, in the temple sermon, Jeremiah lays out the importance of justice and righteousness in God’s order. Rather than an embodiment of transcendence, Jeremiah believed the temple and its ritual practice were tools of social control.8 Torah obedience was critical to the prophet’s understanding of mission. While some turned to idolatry, and others hid in the rituals of the temple, Jeremiah sees that the people have lost their way. Jeremiah is required to preach the demands of the Torah though living in tension with his cultural tradition. One can infer that because of his priestly pedigree he was afforded social privileges and connections to the temple to which he would otherwise not have access. Even if this closeness to power carried some significance in the scope of Jeremiah’s work, his cultural grooming shaped his worldview. Third, the prophet interpreted God’s intervening activity in society, often through symbols. God’s judgment on Israel’s sins was demonstrated by Babylon’s oppression. Jeremiah took upon himself a yoke of straps and bars, and put them upon his neck. This yoke symbolized Israel’s oppressive future and forthcoming deportation from Jerusalem into Babylonian exile. While King Zedekiah of Judah had entertained competing prophecies from the cultic prophets of the temple, Jeremiah had the difficult task of explaining that it was God’s will that Judah submit and serve Babylon under her king, Nebuchadnezzar. Fourth, the prophet criticized political infrastructures that failed to recognize God’s sovereign agenda. For example, the prophets denounced lying prophets. False prophets were destructive forces in the political and religious system of Israel. In many instances, the cultic prophets protected the status quo. Jeremiah’s forceful condemnation of the prophet Hananiah, who opposed Jeremiah’s prognosis of Jerusalem’s destruction and exile of its citizens, and pronounce to the king’s court that God had ordained a less severe punishment, is a scenario that reveals the stiff challenge to the prophet’s authority. In response to Hananiah’s proclamation, Jeremiah speaks these words: “Listen, Hananiah, the Lord has not sent you, and you made the people trust in a

276

Handbook of African American Theology

lie . . . Within this year you will be dead, because you have spoken rebellion against the Lord” (Jer. 28:15-16). In the succeeding verse, the text reads, “In the same year, in that seventh month, the prophet Hananiah died” (v.17). With this in mind, it is important to note that ancient prophets rarely took up concrete social issues as moderns do, perhaps to be assumed given the conflation of the terms social justice and prophetic ministry as being synonymous. Instead, their acts of utterance spoke in stinging and yet elusive metaphorically rich poetic idiom as a counterproposition to any one-sided construal of reality. The prophet had to have great concern about the integrity of the spoken Word. True prophets criticized the established structures that masked the mediation of God’s liberating presence. Often, as in the case of the Jeremiah versus Hananiah dispute, God’s messenger is called to task and the prophet’s message is put to the test. The prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel in his showdown with the prophets of Baal is a notable example. In this instance, the competing prophecy emanates from within the contours of Jeremiah’s religious community.9 Hence, the scriptural deduction here is that the true prophet is one whose words come true (cf. 28: 9). Lies spoken to God’s people invited God’s wrath. Accordingly, if the primary channel of God’s message arrived to the people through the prophet, then the nature of God’s decree commanded a high accord. There are obvious problems in evaluating what is true prophecy. Does one judge truth based on the prophet’s faithfulness to the task, or does one evaluate it on the grounds of speech efficacy? Or, even more poignant, “Is the truth of prophecy something enclosed or meant to be discerned by its immediate hearers?” These questions loom large when considering the prophet’s social milieu, but answers to these questions are out of the scope of this essay’s concern. What is of concern for our purposes, however, is that a theologically reflective biblical backdrop is provided for thinking about prophetic continuities and discontinuities along ancient and contemporary lines. Two noteworthy considerations are important to understand before attempting to draw any parallels between the biblical prophet and the prophetic preaching of contemporary figures. The first consideration recognizes the implausibility for anyone in modern times to function precisely as did the Old Testament prophet. The Hebrew prophet did not preach from Scripture based on the prophet’s witness, as the contemporary cleric does to discern and proclaim how God works in current times. The second consideration acknowledges that Christian preaching in the modern sense qualifies as prophecy in so far as it points to God’s work, but only in a secondary manner because the full Word of God has now been spoken and incarnated in Jesus Christ, and the reconciliation between God and humankind has commenced.10 Therefore, determined by Christian faith commitments, the prophetic Word is “not only communication or proclamation but also the putting into operation what is announced. Not only a Word about judgment and salvation but also a power that initiates and brings them both to reality.”11 In Christian tradition that announcement of hope is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, whose incarnational salvific, redemptive, and reconciling presence offers life to a deathly world. Whether explicitly named or presupposed in the prophetic sermon proclaimed, at the heart of prophetic preaching is the gospel of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

Prophetic Preaching and Theological Reflection

277

African American prophetic preaching: continuities and possibilities Why is it important to discuss prophetic preaching in context-specific ways? African American prophetic preaching is meditational speech. It bears no fundamental distinction from prophetic preaching in general, except to the extent that it is seen as God-summoned speech clothed in cultural particularity.12 Contextual awareness in preaching helps us to see that we bring ourselves to the scriptural texts we interpret, and our seeing (if we see anything at all) is revealed through the lens of our lived experience. Contextualization implores receptors of the preached Word to reinterpret their life and activities both in light of Jesus’s passion and in the sphere of their own passion stories. Because our stories matter, and since the clothes of culture always shape meaning in the task of preaching, naming our own historical reality increases the significance of preaching a prophetic Word; therefore, we are never permitted to say that we understand the meaning of prophetic preaching, or any preaching for that matter, without becoming part of the arrived-at meaning itself.13 Furthermore, one must keep in mind that Jesus of Nazareth—the expressed content of Christian proclamation—was not a rich Palestinian Jew, but rather a revolutionary figure who live more than two thousand years ago in a living community. In other words, Jesus had a specific ethnic and religious identity, and this is not insignificant given Western culture’s enduring fascination and general depiction of Jesus as a Nordic martyr. A Jesus separated from his Judaic heritage and social location, which can only exist in the colonized mind, renders Jesus ahistorical, mythical, and incapable of saving humanity. As God-summoned proclamation that lifts and values the reality that sociocultural context shapes preachers and their sermons, African American prophetic preaching reveals a picture of what God intends and expects of God’s human creation—a picture that enables persons and faith communities to interpret their situation in light of God’s justice, and to name as sin activities that frustrate God’s life-giving purposes. Any contemporary examination into the nature of prophetic preaching as practiced in African American churches first lifts and values the mutually enriching relationship between biblical interpretation and sociocultural contexts. Second, theological reflection on prophetic black preaching as a distinctive speech form among other important modes of preaching and religious discourse options brings to bear an engaged discussion about justice and hope and how prophetic preaching resources persons for the work of rebuffing systems, practices, and policies that devalue the dignity and worth of all persons.

Four characteristic marks Four constitutive marks exist that together establish a paradigmatic model of African American prophetic preaching that is both biblical and contextual. Interpreting the gospel in a present–future sense based on the principles of justice, African American prophetic preaching, representing the paradigm, 1) unmasks systemic evil and deceptive human practices by means of moral suasion and subversive rhetoric;

278

Handbook of African American Theology

2) remains interminably hopeful when confronted with human tragedy and communal despair; 3) connects the speech act with just actions as concrete praxis to help people freely participate in naming their reality; and 4) carries an impulse for beauty in its use of language and culture.14 Three regulative features govern the conceptual construction or paradigmatic understanding of the idea that African American prophetic preaching derived its message and agenda from the Hebrew prophet.15 The prophetic Word of God begins with stunned, unjustified, and unargued speech of affirmation and celebration; it insists on naming places where ambiguity, intrusion, and gift are present; it dares speech that specifies concrete places where the reality of God’s otherness is at work decisively in the human process; and, finally, it gives to these concrete happenings the name of holiness, either holy graciousness or holy judgment.16 The first feature that governs this conceptual construction insists that prophetic black preaching is God-summoned speech that runs counter to the tendency to reduce the prophetic Word proclaimed to positivistic history or modern rationality. Preaching of this kind rejects the assumption that every justifiable assertion can be scientifically proven or disproven, which means that the historical process is closed off, rendering God incapable of intruding decisively in the human process and reenacting the impossible. Prophetic preaching is epistemologically distinctive. In contrast to attempts to render God as deferential to Cartesian ideals or to make God some spectral figure, prophetic preaching begins at a different place and in a different mode of discourse, which insists on naming God as an emancipating interventionist actively involved in human affairs.17 A second limit imposed is similar to the first. Prophetic black preaching dares to speak about God’s presence in places where pain, oppression, and neglect are all too apparent. And finally, a third limit imposed relating to this constructed paradigm is that this distinctive form of prophetic discourse names experiences within concrete and temporal spaces holy.18

Epochs and environments shaping prophetic black preaching I have argued elsewhere that in light of the grave dilemmas of interwar-period America in the first half of the twentieth century the Great Migration period produced a specific mode of prophetic preaching—prophetic black preaching—that flowered within the African American church. Distinguished black clerics such as J.C. Austin, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Reverdy Cassius Ransom, Florence Spearing Randolph, and a few others responded to the perplexing conditions evoked by the migration crisis. Their words offered a critique of the status quo from the perspective of God’s intention for creation, and by addressing the dehumanizing political and socioeconomic conditions of their listeners, they encouraged their listeners to maintain their human dignity and empowered them to name their reality to transform it. These preachers awakened a different reality in their Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, and African Methodist Episcopal Zion contexts. They earned distinction based on their recognition of social injustice and on how they taught scores of listeners to actively practice hope and seek spiritual and social salvation, politically, economically, and educationally. These strident clerics proclaimed messages of hope but also directed people to resources.

Prophetic Preaching and Theological Reflection

279

From one generation to the next, speaking provocatively of God’s presence in concrete places where pain, oppression, and neglect rear their menacing heads, prophetic preaching in the African American church has carried a theosociopolitical mandate shaped by these concerns, which has been the mediating apparatus for translating the message of God’s abiding love and hope for humankind. Though a distinctive mode of prophetic preaching emerged in the Great Migration period, the power of the prophetic preaching paradigm did not remain fixed in interwar-period America. Rather, in the voices of black ministers who would daringly speak to African American exigencies in subsequent eras, one discovers that African American preachers addressed operationally a broader canon of issues. The matrices of concern in subsequent eras may exhibit more complexity in terms of circumstance, but the paradigm’s four constitutive marks are not only enduring in their relevance, they have guided ministers in the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights eras, and have awakened new expressions in the postmodern era. The clerical heirs of the Great Migration preachers are the linking agents for their times. Similar to his prophetic preaching forebears who pointed out America’s political establishment’s inability to provide basic citizenship rights for blacks, Martin Luther King, Jr. brought forth the prophetic interpretation of America’s enduring problem of racism, which he later conjoined with the problems of militarism and poverty.19 Focusing on the intersection of race, gender, and class concerns as it relates to creating theological space for black women, womanist scholar and Presbyterian preacher Katie Cannon’s hermeneutical and homiletical vision in the post-Civil Rights period draws on black women literary figures such as Zora Neale Hurston and other seldomconsidered persons as theological sources. Civil Rights legend Otis Moss, Jr.’s commitment to prophetically conscious preaching is well documented. Shaping sermons within the backdrop of the upsurge of televangelism, Moss has been a prominent voice speaking to the decline of prophetic preaching in an age of conspicuous consumption, materialism, and milquetoast preaching. The culture production of gospel-infused rap music has made its presence felt in many black churches. Theological grammar, religious ideas, and biblical concepts pervade the lyrics of hip-hop social poets, expressly Christian or not. Christian rapper Lecrae’s trendsetting song “Welcome to America,”20 for example, couches witty hip-hop sophistry as Lecrae lifts the veil of America’s race predicament and names as sin the exploitative practices of capitalism and the vices it encourages. Demonstrating how cultural aesthetics is the basis of the imaginative genius and furtive power of prophetic black preaching, Lecrae achieves two primary goals in his musical sermon: he unmasks deceptive practices that stifle human flourishing in America and around the globe and reminds America’s citizens that, despite the poor and privileged bifurcation that is America, gratitude for mercy is always in order for an apostate society that has repeatedly taken God’s beneficence for granted.

Why is prophetic preaching needed today? For years the prophetic Word has been decisive speech in America’s black pulpits in crisis times, amid a range of congregational and secular community expectations. But

280

Handbook of African American Theology

today, the once typically asset-rich black pulpit is in deep crisis because it has become confused about its mission to the African American community. More than a few black preachers, even some of the most revered, have confused the biblical prophet’s message of divine intentionality with both pious God-talk and their own preoccupation with preaching the gospel of health and wealth on one hand and their embrace of impious living in blatant disregard for holiness and righteousness on the other. Prophetic preaching is diametrically opposed to the prosperity message; its agenda shuns manipulation tactics and names self-serving, self-deceiving ideological practices sin. Furthermore, myriad issues having negative impact on black life in America have contributed to the blunting of the African American church’s prophetic message. But the prosperity movement seems to be the ideological root cause of many of the distorted views about health and material success, which have long been a preoccupation of historically disenfranchised black people. The prosperity gospel often veils itself as priestly in nature; it speaks concern about spiritual renewal and faith formation, but its message empties the cross of its meaning.21 Prosperity preachers use the language of “prophecy” to motivate people to support materialistic agendas that little serve the faithful. According to the prosperity message, the “blessed life” is the divine right of every Christian, the believer’s reward for her or his unshakeable faith and positive thinking. Although the mortgage crisis in the United States affected virtually all American citizens, it dealt a particularly crushing blow to black communities, where the rate of foreclosure, credit card debt, unscrupulous payday lending practices, violent crime, and underemployment have become too difficult to ignore. By promoting the worldview that gave us this economic crisis, prosperity theologians are partly to blame. Whether luring congregants to spacious amphitheaters or storefront start-ups, messages centered on obtaining wealth based on one’s positive confession and faith have had great appeal to blacks of every class, especially given the rapid proliferation of black megachurches in the last three decades.22 The prophetic Word delivered as an expression of the black communal rhetorical tradition is an absurd declaration about justice overcoming forces of injustice. To communities in crisis, it is a Word of life in the place of death—a daring dispatch of hope in the predicament of human suffering.23 Preaching of this kind is emancipatory speech that speaks truth and promise, judgment and restoration, and life and hope. It stands against idolatry, self-serving behavior, and deceptive human practice; it broadcasts hope in contexts of misery and despair; it couples speech performance with ethical action to recover muted voices; and it summons language and art to alter human perception for the purpose of revealing life as it is meant to be. Filtered and contextually-shaped, prophetic preaching is in the end a God-summoned, humanizing speech about telling the truth so that human flourishing is made possible in a deathly world.

Notes 1

Kenyatta R. Gilbert, A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 6.

Prophetic Preaching and Theological Reflection 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

281

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 171. Patrick D. Miller, ed., foreword to Texts that Linger, Words that Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices, by Walter Brueggeman (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), vii. Kenyatta R. Gilbert, “Relentless Hope: Prophetic Imagination in a Time of Despair” in Sojourners (January 2018): 18. See Walter Brueggeman, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd edn. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001) and see also Walter Brueggeman, The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipatory Word (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 2. Brueggeman, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 110. Brueggeman, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids, MO: Eerdmans, 1998), 78. Horst Dietrich Preuss claims that false prophets do not appear in the Old Testament in the guise of “swindlers” who only pretend to be prophets (cf. H.D. Preuss, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, translated by Leo Perdue (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 82. It is possible that the prophet Hananiah, a temple functionary with cultic duties, operated from a strict allegiance to the royal tradition ideology, with its distorted claims about land and temple as unconditional gifts from Yahweh. Cf. Brueggeman, Commentary on Jeremiah, 77–8. Elizabeth Achtemeier, Preaching from the Old Testament (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989), 110. Preuss, Old Testament Theology, 80. Gilbert, A Pursued Justice, 6. Ibid., ix. Ibid., 6. The value of these controls allows the implications of prophetic preaching in a considerably broader way that the “constitutive” characteristics do not allow. Brueggeman, “Prophetic Word of God and History,” in Miller, Texts that Linger, 36. Quoted in Gilbert, A Pursued Justice, 70. Ibid., 36. Quoted in Gilbert, A Pursued Justice, 69. Ibid., 36. Quoted in Gilbert, A Pursued Justice, 70. Gilbert, A Pursued Justice, 104. See Lecrae’s music video “Welcome to America” at https://youtu.be/qlx9jZcBkNA Gilbert, A Pursued Justice, 131–2. Although it would be inaccurate to claim that black megachurches and prosperity theology go hand in hand since there are many progressive megachurches doing justice work and actively supporting community renewal initiatives, there are several megachurches, particularly in the South, who in divorce of denominational or connectional ties, in pursuit of enlarged memberships, have relaxed their commitment to prophetic ministry. See Tamelyn Tucker-Worgs, The Black Megachurch: Theology, Gender, and the Politics of Public Engagement (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011). Gilbert, A Pursued Justice, 132.

21

Plenty Good Room Revisited: The Quest for a Radically Inclusive Twenty-first-century Black Church Marcia Y. Riggs

Plenty Good Room Revisited Plenty Good Room: Women versus Male Power in the Black Church1 had roots in my desire to place the subject of sexism/heterosexism, or what I referred to as sexualgender injustice,2 at the center of an analysis of the African American church in a quest to strengthen the church’s witness to God’s justice in church and society. I contended that there is a fundamental hypocrisy in calling for justice for African American people in society while oppressing women in the churches. Having been told frequently by black male clergy that sexism was a white problem and/or a sociological rather than a theological problem, I decided to write a book that would push for dialogue on the subject. Although I knew that crafting a biblical and/or theological argument for sexual-gender justice might speak more directly to those male clergy’s reasons for dismissing issues of sexual-gender oppression, I decided that an ethical analysis that used examples from the lived experiences of black women might serve as a better point of departure for evoking and provoking discussion. Written from the perspective of women’s experiences (using case studies) in the churches, I presented an ethical analysis of practices rather than an argument driven by biblical texts and theological beliefs. The intent was that readers of the book who are members of the African American church would be pushed to think anew about what we are doing, and in turn we might then ask questions about the biblical and theological justifications that are used to support our practices. Moreover, I wanted to write a text that enlarged denominational policy and academic discourse about sexualized behavior and clergy misconduct in the churches from a concentration on professional ethics as codes of conduct to discourse about transformation of relationships and practices in the churches, thus this was an analysis of the moral life of African American churches. By focusing on the broader notion of the moral life of the churches, I sought to characterize the problem of sexual-gender injustice as a communal problem in which we were all complicit. The publisher’s title for the book skews that intent by including a subtitle that suggests a combative

284

Handbook of African American Theology

perspective—women versus male power. While I do not deny the contentious nature of the sexual-gender relations that I am describing or the way that church structures and traditions do in fact comprise a systemic heteropatriarchal power structure, I wanted to call black men and women to account for shared collusion in the maintenance of sexual-gender injustice in the churches. The aims of the book may be summarized thus: 1. To describe the dynamics of sexual-gender relations from the perspective of black women’s lived experience. 2. To challenge the self-understanding of the African American church as a “surrogate world” providing relief and agency for black liberation premised solely or primarily upon liberation from racial and economic oppression. 3. To offer avenues for counter-socialization with respect to our internalized sexual-gender myths as well as to nurture African American women and men into healthy moral postures for engaging each other as they become advocates for sexual-gender justice in the church and society. 4. To propose a vision of the moral life of the African American church that addressed both relational and structural sexual-gender injustice on the way to becoming a liberated church. Although by the end of the book I offered a vision to guide the moral life of the church that is consistent with a womanist race-gender-class intersectional analysis, I realize that my focused attention upon sexual-gender injustice continued a tendency toward myopic analysis of the African American church that I had sought to correct. Using Acts 4:32-5:11,3 the moral vision called upon men and women to acknowledge their complicity in the destructive institutional power of sexual-gender injustice in the church. The Acts text was the basis for this assertion. It is my contention that when African American women and men act in complicity with sexual-gender injustice in the church, the church betrays its moral vision and corrupts both its internal moral life and its witness in the larger society. Such complicity between men (like Ananias) and women (like Sapphira) is willful hypocrisy against the Holy Spirit that is the power of the church. Breaking complicity with the moral corruption of sexual-gender injustice requires accountability on the part of clergy (like Peter) and laity (like those who remove the dead Ananias and Sapphira) who are willing to name the misconduct publicly so as to create a communal ethos of responsibility within the church that grounds its life and witness to others (“And great fear seized the whole church and all who heard these things”4). The Acts-based moral vision for the African American church is important because it illustrates how sexual-gender injustice is interconnected with various forms of deception (i.e. Ananias and Sapphira lying about economic resources) that undermine the moral life of the church. In this essay, I intend to reframe my argument by focusing on two primary questions: (1) How is violence manifest in the moral life of the African American church? (2) What happens if discerning the meaning of and actions required by the justice of God (rather than focusing on the end, black liberation) drives the agenda for the

The Quest for a Radicaliy Inclusive Black Church

285

twenty-first-century African American church? I return explicitly to these two questions at the end of the essay. For now, though, some explanation of the two terms, violence and God’s justice, that drive these two questions.

Violence and God’s justice: concepts for enlarging the black liberation agenda Violence is readily understood when it is expressed physically. However, violence has a variety of forms: verbal, psychological, emotional, spiritual. And, these forms finally are means for objectifying and violating others and even oneself. When we think of violence in this way, it is considered episodic; violence happens at some moment when persons, groups, and/or systems act upon one another with the intent to harm. I suggest we shift to an understanding of violence as constitutive (rather than episodic) of the social fabric of the institutional sites where we live together. In the black church as an institution, violence permeates and distorts the organizational structure and infects or destroys relationships between people, speech, and actions. Consequently, violence thwarts the moral life of the church. Figure 21.1 illustrates this last point. Violence creates a context of disconnection, alienation, and distortion. To bring to consciousness the way that violence is constitutive of the church’s structure and practices—of its social fabric—the church must think of the justice of God as the theological touchstone for its life and as the means by which to counter this violence. A biblical view of the justice of God asserts this: “Justice flows from God’s

Figure 21.1 Violence in Church structure

286

Handbook of African American Theology

own being and designates the way God intends the world to be. But, things have fallen into disorder; the shalom of creation has been ruptured. God responds by seeking to restore the world to the way it ought to be.”5 The justice of God at the center of the moral life of the African American church means that being and doing as church must manifest some form of the multiple aims of justice: reparative or punitive (corrects present or past wrongs), compensatory (ensures that everyone receives her/his due), restorative (seeks repair of relationship), and/or distributive (transforms patterns of injustice and creates ongoing equity). The justice of God as the church’s theological center will mean that internal and external criticism is brought to bear the upon the means and ends of black liberation. With the justice of God at the center, the constituent parts of the church’s life (people, speech, and actions) interface. The church’s life that emanates from God’s justice is a site where radical love, prophetic preaching, emancipatory teaching, and embodiment are features of its moral life. Figure 21.2 illustrates this last point. Now, let’s discuss three scholars’ critical analyses of the African American church important to constructing an ethical framework for more comprehensive analysis of and response to injustices both internal and external to the African American church. The discussion follows the chronology of the publication of the texts.

Figure 21.2 Church’s life emanating from God’s justice

The Quest for a Radicaliy Inclusive Black Church

287

Breaches of justice in the African American church’s black liberation agenda In Practical Theology for Black Churches: Bridging Black Theology and African American Folk Religion,6 Dale P. Andrews analyzes the disjunction between academic black theology and the folk religion of black churches. According to Andrews, this disjunction derives from black theology’s misdiagnosis of the black church’s failure to fulfill its liberation mandate. Black theology criticizes the otherworldliness or escapist mentality of the black church, insisting that it has forsaken its prophetic understanding of liberation—freedom from oppression here and now. Andrews counters this criticism by examining the ecclesiology of the black church. He notes the centrality of a refuge paradigm for black churches as a source of black theology’s critique. The refuge paradigm undergirds an ecclesiology that emphasizes “survival, nurture, and growth of African Americans through the Christian faith. The church fulfilled the emotional, spiritual, and sociological needs of an alienated people. It provided a community that affirmed, even nurtured black humanity and worth in an otherwise hostile and degrading social existence.”7 Andrews asserts that the “church-as-refuge” paradigm does not have a solely otherworldly focus; it affirms liberation in that the church is the place where black Christians are nurtured for engagement in social protest. Andrews’s constructive proposal is a prophetic practical theology for the black church that reconceptualizes the historical meaning of the church as refuge. “For black churches, the refuge legacy sustains a dialectic relationship between spiritual faith and liberation—that is, between pastoral tactics of survival and the active pursuit of justice.”8 Key to this reconceptualization is a shift to a faith identity paradigm. Overall, Faith identity profiles the relationship between black humanity and God, individually and corporately. The biblical understanding of creation and imago Dei conveys the inherent and inalienable value of the person to God. Early in the African American encounter with Christianity, the Exodus narrative advanced the adoption of black humanity and black churches as a people of God. It solidified a corporate identity under the sovereignty of God, the Creator and Liberator.9

Andrews insists that black theology’s critique of the contemporary black church’s escapism missed the mark because of a failure to recognize the way that the gains of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s fostered greater American individualism and class division among black people as well as displaced black churches as a source for religious nurture. In sum, Andrews writes: The arbitration of expected civil liberties and economic opportunity extending beyond the Civil Rights era created gross incongruity between the anticipated objective reality of equality and the subjective experiences of African Americans. A small growing middle class and an entrapped, but expanding, black underclass struggled with a resurgence of unsuccessful resocialization due to persistent racism in American society. Black churches were displaced from their historically central role in the then fragmenting black community.10

288

Handbook of African American Theology

Finally, Andrews’s prophetic practical theology corrects black theology’s judgment of and challenge to the black churches. Prophetic practical theology emphasizes the prophetic call to be a covenant community. “Within a covenantal practical theology, the prophetic tradition places liberation ethics in mutual interaction with repentance, reform, and reconciliation.”11 Andrews insists that this proposed theology renders the prophetic holistic by regrounding it in God’s will. The biblical prophets of the Sinai and Davidic covenants stressed God’s will for God’s covenant people. This means biblically that liberation derives not solely from the covenant coming out of the Exodus; the Davidic covenant was bound to the Mosaic law of the Sinai covenant. “However, in the reconciliation of the surviving remnant, the prophetic tradition transferred the promises and responsibilities of the Davidic covenant directly to the people themselves.”12 Andrews sums up his proposal thus: In this cultural milieu, black churches have lost the covenant relation between spiritual intimacy with God and human care for others. American individualism disrupts God’s will for humanity as revealed in the prophetic inspiration of a covenant community. Personal salvation is not the goal of redemption history; it is a “beginning again.” Prophetic preaching not only insists upon human care but also maintains the correlation between human reflexivity and theological relationality, which characterizes prophetic consciousness. Prophetic ministry unites worship and praxis, salvation and social justice.13

Consequently, a first breach of justice in the African American church’s liberation agenda derives from a failure to attend to the holistic liberation of the mind/body/ spirit of individuals as prerequisite to their agency for black liberation in society. Surely, justice has something to do with (a) the interrelationship between freedom of the individual, (b) corporate responsibility for freedom of the individual and freedom within a community, and (c) liberation as social justice in society. The captivity of the African American churches to society’s individualism and attendant signs of success have indeed subverted (or at least circumvented) the agenda for black liberation in society, not because of escapism but because of this-worldliness. Some may describe the this-worldliness with reference to a prosperity gospel,14 but I think that Andrews’s analysis and proposal point more directly to the biblical/theological and social roots of the church’s failure. If the church’s liberation agenda is to be fulfilled, it must be one that is grounded in the will of God’s justice manifest within the moral life of the churches as it drives a larger black liberation agenda. Maisha Handy provides another angle to address the failure of the African American church’s black liberation agenda. Her essay, “Fighting the Matrix: Toward a Womanist Pedagogy for the Black Church,”15 begins thus: This fictitious plot [of the Matrix film trilogy] is analogous to what womanist scholars refer to as the “matrix of oppression” or the interlocking nature of race/ gender/class oppression and other forms of oppression that marginalize certain groups. This real matrix exists at personal, group, and systemic levels. Moving away from the identification and analysis of one or two primary forms of discrimination,

The Quest for a Radicaliy Inclusive Black Church

289

womanists view these systems of oppression as connected and assume that each distinct form needs the other in order to function.16

Handy focuses upon the educational ministries of the churches. She notes that often the pedagogies of educational ministries imitate teaching and learning practices that alienate the learners. Using educational models that privilege lectures and texts on Christian doctrine, educators in African American churches ignore resources from a rich cultural heritage and identity. Handy cites Yolanda Smith’s proposal for African American Christian education: Smith offers a “triple-heritage model” that proposes the use of curricula which integrate components of African, African American, and Christian heritage. By reclaiming their full heritage, African American Christians tackle life challenges, drawing from the wellspring of viable resources in their own traditions.17

The retrieval and incorporation of these resources into the Christian education of African Americans is important because here again (as with Andrews) faith identity formation is critical to how persons are empowered for the work of liberation. Moreover, Handy insists that educational ministries provide space for grappling with real life issues: “As they confront issues related to identity, race/gender, class oppression, sexuality, violence, and myriad other issues, they seek to make meaning of their experiences as they engage in the teaching/learning process. The ‘matrix’ is real for them, and they come seeking resources that help them respond to and dismantle oppression.”18 For Handy, Christian education thus begins with an African indigenous understanding of the teacher as healer; the healer/teacher is concerned with nurturing students into a higher spirituality and discerning hidden meanings on the spiritual quest. The liberative pedagogy of the healer/teacher requires active listening as she or he engenders dialogue among community members. “As persons either tell or listen, they learn about themselves and others. Dialogue must include the presence of faith, hope, love, and justice. These qualities foster the kind of shared praxis in the community and create the ideals to which religious education aspires.”19 Referencing the shame that silences many black women in the churches, Handy insists upon the need for a pedagogy of active listening that empowers all members of the community to speak. Equally detrimental to the moral life of the African American churches is that these are spaces dominated by black male leadership while populated by a majority female membership. Handy asks, “In the church context, what does it mean to be in a Black female body?”20 Despite the ways in which black worship involves the body, the church lacks an explicit articulation of gender and embodiment that is liberative. Handy reminds us that Christian theology is incarnational theology: “it pivots on the witness of a God who wraps God’s self in human flesh and becomes an embodied being. Jesus dwells among and with other embodied beings whom he touches.”21 Furthermore, she urges the church not to focus solely on the suffering and crucified body of Jesus as analogue for the bodily suffering of black people. Black people must connect with the

290

Handbook of African American Theology

other embodied experiences of Jesus, such as the anointing of Jesus by the unnamed and unknown woman. Jesus lived touching others physically, and we need to embrace one another as embodied, not simply as spirits. Handy states emphatically: Empowerment and self-love are intricately connected to one’s relationship with embodied living. One of the first steps in mutual recognition is a willingness to accept and celebrate the God-given bodies of others and the entire range of their embodied expressions. We are called to honor one another, not just as spirits, but whole beings including our gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientations.22

Handy urges the church to scrutinize its “rhetoric and politics.”23 The rhetoric and politics of liberation are futile if the church itself is a place where members are silenced and shamed because of their embodied humanity. She says that the black church needs a curriculum of embodiment that includes biblical interpretation that unmasks issues of gender and sexuality, giving special attention to the roles of women in such texts.24 In sum, Christian educators must be trained to teach embodied persons. The Black church should include discourse on sexuality and celebrations of the body in worship. The body should become an important and central curriculum for Christian educators seeking to address physical, mental and emotional health, sexuality, ableism, race and ethnicity, and the many other issues related to the embodied self and community.25

Thus, a second breach of justice in the African American church’s black liberation agenda is the erasure of experiences of embodied living and the consequent oppression of certain social groups within the community. Handy offers a theological critique from the perspective of Incarnation. God’s justice centered in God’s will (Andrews) clearly derives from God’s decision to save, redeem, and reconcile humanity as an embodied human being. An African American church black liberation agenda that brings members to the fight for social justice through churches that have not educated them to mutually recognize and respect one another in their bodies is inadequate, if not doomed to fail. Indeed, the African American church needs to be an embodied New Creation in Christ. The last scholarly voice is that of Kelly Brown Douglas in her book, Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant.26 Douglas begins her critique with the black church’s apologetic defense of itself which she characterizes as “a narrative of civility.” She writes: Generally unarticulated and unrecognized, this narrative of civility is a persistent and controlling narrative within the black church. It presumes that the way black people are perceived by wider society is related to the way in which the black church is perceived. It, therefore, protects the image of the black church and strives to present this church as an institutionalized embodiment of black civility.

The Quest for a Radicaliy Inclusive Black Church

291

Without a doubt, this narrative is inspired by a commitment to black people’s life, freedom and overall social well-being. However, it does not always function to the benefit of all black bodies.27

Douglas outlines the way that this narrative of civility does not benefit all black bodies in terms of the following “paradoxical and troubling tendencies” thus: it 1) emphasizes the uniqueness of black history and culture while exalting white culture; 2) maintains the moral advantage of the oppressed black while incorporating white social-cultural values and ideas; 3) asserts God’s preferential option for those on the marginal while legitimizing a white God; and 4) presents the black church as a refuge for black people while alienating some black bodies.28 These alienated black bodies are referred to by Douglas as blues bodies. Blues bodies are bodies rejected in the black church because they are labelled immoral, sensuous, hypersexual, lower-class— dangerous bodies—that contradict the narrative of civility.29 Importantly, the black church’s narrative of civility is wedded to the evangelical faith narrative of white Protestant puritan morality and a God that has disdain for the body and blackness.30 In other words, the narrative legitimizes a white God along with contempt for black bodies. The result is a black church wherein colorism (black bodies need salvific whiteness through the blood of Jesus) and sexist and heterosexist norms control who’s in and out. Likewise, the theology of the black church aligned with the narrative of civility insists upon a binary worldview of sacred vs. secular. Such a binary based theology makes feasible judgments consistent with the narrative of civility. To counter this theology, Douglas constructs a theology of the crossroads based upon an interpretation of “blues lore [that] substantiates the blues as carrier of a radical black faith tradition.”31 Also, this crossroads theology is consistent with West African religious beliefs that understand the crossroads as the place where the world of the gods and humans meet.32 From the perspective of blues lore, it is at the crossroads where the two musicians found their souls and the power of their gifts. From the perspective of West African religious beliefs, Esu, guardian of the crossroads, overcomes binaries, achieves harmony amid perceived disharmony, and reclaims paradoxes of existence as sources of strength.33 “Therefore, the task of a crossroads theology is to do as the blues do: name, disrupt, and play in the crossroads so as to reveal the power of crossroads intersections.”34 In crossroads theology, the pain of blues bodies (such as that of women and LGBQT persons) is named, a blues bond is revealed (awareness of intersections between various forms of oppression “in order to disrupt the power that divides and separates bodies from one another and segments multiple identities”), and all bodies claim embodied memories and bodily integrity.35 Finally, the God of crossroads theology is present in human history, and “God’s revelation defies social and religious narratives that create either/or and good/bad categories of difference.”36 In crossroads theology, the story of Jesus is a blues story; “God’s entrance into the world is through the marginalized and lowly, it is through the blues body of a woman.”37 Jesus’s ministry is about crossing boundary lines: gender, ethnicity, religion, class, etc. Reading the gospel stories of Jesus’s ministry through a blues lens makes explicit the need for a crossroads theology in the black church. Douglas illustrates this need thus:

292

Handbook of African American Theology

When read through a blues lens, these stories [of Jesus casting out demons] reiterate the wicked side of all persons. They make clear that there is no line to be drawn between wicked bodies and nonwicked bodies, between the righteous and the unrighteous. By implication, these stories continue to contest evangelical faith narratives that suggest certain bodies themselves are wicked bodies, that certain creations are wicked creations, while others are good. They show the vulnerability of all bodies to be possessed by evil, while also affirming the inherent goodness of all bodies.38

Furthermore, in blues perspective, the cross signifies against “divisive and destructive human power;” it is impotent when human and divine power intersect in the crossresurrection event.39 In brief, “the resurrection shows that evil has no stable existence. In the end, the one that was crucified was restored to life. Thus, a mockery was made of prevailing political and religious forces.”40 Finally, Douglas’s crossroads theology exposes the third breach of justice in the black liberation agenda: the narrative of civility wedded to the white evangelical faith narrative legitimates violence in the church. The focus upon black liberation as an end is diminished by the quest for respectability in a society that denigrates black people and the black church. The cost of respectability is that some black bodies are sacrificed in the context of the church while all black bodies are sacrificed in the larger society. The paradoxes of the narrative of civility overwhelm the black liberation agenda when violence rather than God’s justice is the center of the church’s moral life.

The quest for a radically inclusive African American church Why use the term “radically inclusive”? It points to the need for a comprehensive black liberation agenda in the twenty-first century that does not focus upon racial equality as its ultimate end. As the discussion of Andrews, Handy, and Douglas suggest, any black liberation agenda that does not attend to the divisions within the membership of the African American church and community collapses in upon itself. Prophetic criticism is necessary but incomplete without “prophetic ministry that unites worship and praxis, salvation and social justice” (Andrews). The African American church must have a curriculum of embodiment “to address physical, mental and emotional health, sexuality, ableism, race and ethnicity, and the many other issues related to the embodied self and community” (Handy). God is present in human history and on the side of the oppressed in the same way that God entered the world through the blues body of a marginalized woman, and the work of liberation must be as Jesus did ministry, crossing boundaries that created divisions (Douglas). God’s justice is breached when the church is a site of violence that silences, objectifies, and denigrates black bodies in ways that are complicit with black oppression in society. Therefore, the comprehensive black liberation agenda is centered in God’s justice and counters violence at all levels of moral life in the African church. An ethical matrix is needed to guide the African American church in the twenty-first century.

The Quest for a Radicaliy Inclusive Black Church

293

Figure 21.3 Ethical Matrix for the Church

The moral imperatives of the ethical matrix (Figure 21.3) for the twenty-first-century African American church are: l l l

l

Do no harm. Embrace, do not simply tolerate, one another in our embodied differences. Our actions must originate in speech that names the violence that constitutes our life together. Prophetic ministry prepares us to answer the call to be agents of black liberation.

The black liberation agenda in the twenty-first century must be guided by the justice of God and the practice of radical love—love unfettered by narratives that promote division and hatred among the bodies that are the church. According to Patrick S. Cheng, “radical love is a love so extreme that it dissolves our existing boundaries”41—boundaries that separate us from other people and from God. Truthtelling about the violence of our lives in the African American church and community and the society must drive black liberation. The agenda for black liberation in the twenty-first century must be centered in the justice of God so that it does not have too narrow a focus for the ministry of God’s redeeming and reconciling radical love of inclusion.

Notes 1

Marcia Y. Riggs, Plenty Good Room: Women Versus Male Power in the Black Church (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2003).

294 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Handbook of African American Theology I used the term “sexual-gender injustice” to characterize the issue in terms of both its elements of biological differences (sexual), and systems, structures, ideologies, and practices (heteropatriarchy and heterosexism). Riggs, Plenty Good Room, chapter 4. Ibid., 97–8. Chris Marshall, The Little Book of Biblical Justice: A Fresh Approach to the Bible’s Teachings on Justice (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2005), 48. Dale P. Andrews, Practical Theology for Black Churches: Bridging Black Theology and African American Folk Religion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002). Kindle edition. Andrews, Practical Theology, Location 397. Ibid., Location 409. Ibid., Location 558. Ibid., Location 714. Ibid., Location 1448. Ibid., Location 1410. Ibid., Location 1478. Stephanie Y. Mitchem, Name It and Claim It: Prosperity Preaching in the Black Church (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2007); Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Sandra L. Barnes, Live Long and Prosper: How Black Megachurches Address HIV/AIDS and Poverty in the Age of Prosperity Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Maisha Handy, “Fighting the Matrix: Toward a Womanist Pedagogy for the Black Church,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center XXXII (2005). Handy, “Matrix,” 52. Yolanda Smith, Reclaiming the Spirituals: New Possibilities for African American Christian Education (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2004), viii as cited in Handy, “Matrix,” 65. Handy, “Matrix,” 55. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 80. Kelly Brown Douglas, Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Kindle edition. Ibid., Location 150. Ibid. Ibid., Locations 1780–2. Ibid., Location 3472. Ibid, Location 2515; 2534. The lore is that Robert and Tommy Johnson became accomplished blues guitarists at a crossroads where he was given a supernatural ability to play the guitar. Ibid., Location 2544. Ibid., Locations 2536–74. Ibid., Location 2650. Ibid., Locations 2698–864.

The Quest for a Radicaliy Inclusive Black Church 36 37 38 39 40 41

295

Ibid., Location 2966. Ibid., Location 3030. Ibid., Location 3139. Ibid., Location 3196. Ibid., Location 3215. Patrick S. Cheng, Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (New York: Seabury Books, 2011), Kindle Edition, Location 99.

22

Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement: Four Perspectives Beverly J. Goines

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people of African American heritage left predominantly white Protestant denominations to form separate black1 denominations because of racism, discrimination, and segregation. When these black denominations were initially formed, they often kept the same doctrine and polity of the white denominations from which they separated. According to H. Richard Niebuhr, the only major difference between the white denominations and their black counterparts was the color of the people who attended: the separation was anthropological, not theological.2 However, these black churches were also different culturally, in terms of music, preaching, length of services, and traditions such as Watch Night.3 These predominantly black Protestant churches came to be known collectively as the “black church.” Simultaneously, those blacks who remained in white denominations often attended all-black congregations within the white denomination; in effect, there were segregated churches within many denominations. As Niebuhr observed, denominationalism “represents the accommodation of Christianity to the caste system of human society.”4 The word ecumenism has different meanings. In Greek (oikoumenikos) and Latin (oecumenicus), the word originally referred to the inhabited world. Around 1570, the term was adopted in English for ecclesial use to refer to the whole of the Christian church. In theological circles, the word is now generally used to refer to efforts to achieve worldwide Christian unity. Christian unity can take various forms—for example: organic unity and covenantal unity. Organic unity may be characterized as the goal of ecumenical dialogue that seeks to resolve all church-dividing differences— both doctrinal and ecclesiastical—that prevent Christians from uniting to form one visible church. Covenantal unity may be characterized as the goal of dialogue of people who agree to work together on common issues, while mutually accepting their respective denominational structures and doctrinal differences. Covenantal unity and organic unity are two possible ecumenical configurations for uniting all Christians as members of a visible universal church. The formation of black churches effectively added another dimension to the problematic of ecumenism5—in addition to church-dividing issues of doctrine,

298

Handbook of African American Theology

theology, and ecclesiology, race, ethics, and morality become a part of every discussion in which members of black churches enter into ecumenical dialogue with predominantly white churches and organizations. In other words, race is inevitably and necessarily an issue whenever the black church participates in conversation within the “larger ecumenical community” or “larger ecumenical movement.” To gain both information and insight into the relationship between the black church and the ecumenical movement, four black theologians who represent different perspectives on the ecumenical movement6 in relation to the black church were interviewed: Thomas L. Hoyt, Jr.,7 Frederick L. Ware,8 Delores C. Carpenter,9 and D.H. Kortright Davis.10 In addition to the examination of the history of racism in the ecumenical movement generally and in the experiences of the African American theologians interviewed for this study, this chapter seeks to explore the future of the black church’s participation in the ecumenical movement through their visions of ecumenism.

Racism and the ecumenical movement Because the concept of racism was intertwined with Christianity during the Renaissance and Enlightenment,11 racism has been a part of the ecumenical movement from its beginning. The Protestant denominations formed in Europe during the Reformation provided the theological foundation and institutional models (primarily Baptist and Methodist12) that were brought to the “New World” by immigrants and co-opted by both freed and enslaved people of African descent who formed the black church in the United States many years later. The Protestant colonizing country that imported most of the slaves to North America and some parts of the Caribbean was Britain. The international ecumenical movement emerged out of the Protestant missionary movement,13 which was a product of European colonialism. To prevent religious competition and confusion among potential converts, missionaries developed a system of “comity”14 that allocated specific areas of the world to missionaries from a particular denomination. As comity agreements began to formalize, missionary meetings began to take place. The World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 is often considered the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement. The Faith & Order movement, Life & Work movement, and International Missionary Council began as a result of the World Missionary Conference. In 1948, the Faith & Order and Life & Work movements merged to form the World Council of Churches (WCC). Realizing that Christian unity and Christian missions could not be discussed separately, the International Missionary Council joined the World Council of Churches in 1961.15 The Roman Catholic Church did not officially participate in the ecumenical movement until 1952 when Roman Catholic observers attended the Faith & Order meeting in Lund, Sweden. The Roman Catholic Church’s stance on ecumenism began to shift in 1938 with the establishment of the Una Sancta Brotherhood for ecumenical conversation. The Unitas ecumenical center was established in Rome in 1945 and an Instruction of the Holy Office allowed limited ecumenical participation in 1949.

Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement

299

Although the Roman Catholic Church is not a member of the World Council of Churches, the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism (November 21, 1964) changed the way the Catholic Church viewed other Christians and opened the door for ecumenical involvement. Prior to the 1900s, Christians in the United States worked together in various organizations, but generally outside of their denominational structures.16 The American Education Society founded in 1815, the American Sunday School Union founded in 1824, the American Tract Society founded in 1825, and the American Anti-Slavery Society founded in 1833 are examples of such non-denominational organizations.17 According to Samuel McCrea Cavert, “the beginning of the twentieth century is clearly marked as a time when a new movement toward unity was arising in the churches.”18 The numerous Christian denominations and issues related to the newly developing urban industrial society at the turn of the twentieth century necessitated a different response from Christian churches. A meeting was held November 15–21, 1905, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, by members of the National Federation of Churches and Christian Workers to plan the structure of the Federal Council of Churches. Representatives from twenty-nine denominations attended, including two historically black denominations: the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion.19 The “trend toward greater social responsibility and the trend toward a cooperative unity gradually converged, leading in 1908 to the organization of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC), the first national structure officially yoking denominations together as corporate bodies.”20 When the inaugural meeting of the Federal Council took place in December 1908, all of the churches that attended the structural meeting in 1905 ratified its constitution, in addition to five new churches, one of which was the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. According to Mary Sawyer, the Federal Council began as the voice of the social gospel movement, a movement that, coupled with ecumenism, was responding to the labor issues that came with industrialization.21 Among the pressing issues for the Federal Council was the exclusion of the majority of black people, even the constituents of the black churches that were a part of the Federal Council because Race and racism and their socioeconomic—or moral—ramifications were not pressing considerations in the establishment of ecumenical bodies. As the American working classes unionized to challenge industrial management, many Protestant churches redefined their constituency accordingly. But since African Americans were largely excluded from the working classes by virtue of their caste status, the churches’ new definitions of constituency included blacks no more than had the old.22

While black denominations were represented in the Federal Council by prominent black leaders such as “Benjamin Mays, Reverdy Ransom, William Jernagin, Mary McLeod Bethune, and George Edmund Haynes, who for twenty-five years headed the FCC’s Commission on Race Relations,”23 it took the Federal Council thirty-eight years after its founding and twenty-five years after the establishment of the Commission on Race Relations to pass a resolution in 1946 in opposition to segregation.24 The “discrepancy within the FCC between black expectations and white intentions had

300

Handbook of African American Theology

long since prompted the formation of a black ecumenical body, which was known as the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches”25 and was founded in 1934.26 As time passed, it became evident that the Federal Council’s structure needed greater centralization, as the Federal Council worked with eight interdenominational agencies and each agency formed a new joint committee with the Federal Council whenever the need arose. “A proposed constitution for the National Council, together with an outline of suggested by-laws, was presented to the eight interdenominational agencies on April 25, 1944.”27 Although the approval process took several years, the Constituting Convention of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America (NCC) was held November 28 through December 1, 1950, in Cleveland, Ohio.28 Several forces that converged after World War II led to the shifts we are currently seeing seventy years later in the ecumenical movement. The aftermath of the Holocaust promoted a quest for tolerance and helped break down religious division; wider educational opportunities arose which led to the breakdown of ethnic ghettos and increases in interfaith marriages. The Protestant ecumenical movement steadily gained influence and popularity, while Vatican II opened the door for Catholics to engage in ecumenical and social justice opportunities.29 By the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement, which was ecumenical, interfaith, and multicultural in nature, was in full swing. Black theology, or the interpretation of religious beliefs in relation to the experience of blackness, was flourishing in academic settings. Resistance to similar types of oppression experienced and expressed by black people during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to be expressed by Latin Americans in the form of Catholic liberation theology. The Civil Rights Movement, Catholic liberation theology, and black theology all stressed a bottom-up theology as praxis. All of these currents fed a religious pluralism and liberalism that were supportive of ecumenical efforts. By the 1970s, however, there was a noticeable drop in the membership of liberal mainline churches and an attendant increase in “strict”/fundamentalist-like church attendance, along with the increase of those having no religious affiliation. As mainline churches have declined, so has overall participation in ecumenical organizations. To remain active, ecumenical organizations like the NCC have had to restructure and downsize. This summary history indicates how Christianity and racism are intertwined and how it was not possible for the ecumenical movement to develop without such prejudice. This history of the ecumenical movement demonstrates that the bearers of the Good News seemingly neither respected the societies they contacted nor valued the physical bodies of those to whom they spoke the Word of God. Instead of a culturally sensitive inculturation and contextualization,30 missionary work was often tethered to colonial power and accompanied by cruelty, callousness, and racist attitudes. For many decades, the churches, Protestant and Catholic, lacked critical distance to see and understand their involvement with the colonial enterprise.31

The interviews The interviews analyzed in this article explore the connection between ecumenism and racism by comparing and contrasting the ecumenical visions of the black church in the

Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement

301

theologies of Thomas Hoyt, Jr., Fredrick Ware, Delores Carpenter, and Kortright Davis, and provide insight into the future of the black church’s involvement in the ecumenical movement. Five focus questions32 were posed to the theologians: 1) What is your personal “ecumenical vision”?; 2) What personal experiences have shaped your personal “ecumenical vision”?; 3) What is the official position of your church in regard to ecumenical activity and what type of ecumenical activity does your church currently support?; 4) Is there any difference between your church’s doctrinal understanding of ecumenism and your own theological understanding of ecumenism?; and, 5) How would you describe the “ecumenical vision” of the black church?

What is your “ecumenical vision”? Hoyt’s ecumenical vision stresses Matthew 28:20, which says that Christians should go out into all the world. The purpose of going into the world is not to convert people, but to proclaim the gospel, which says that God has brought to pass the “good news” of freedom, a new age, and a new existence for those who will believe and accept the gift. Hoyt’s ecumenical vision also stresses Matthew 20:1-16, which demonstrates how the oppressed can adopt the thinking and actions of the oppressor. The poor then, unwittingly, act against their own best interest. For Hoyt, the poor must recognize when they have appropriated unjust living, and the oppressor must recognize that the poor/oppressed must be offered recompense (not handouts) for the prolonged social, political, economic, and racial oppression experienced by black people. Hoyt’s ecumenical vision couples justice with reconciliation because justice without reconciliation will lead to the poor seeking revenge. When justice is coupled with reconciliation, the former oppressed and oppressor can now live on equal footing as victors. Lastly, Hoyt’s ecumenical vision would promote creation history over salvation history because creation history considers the way in which all God’s creation can share and take care of the earth and live the best life possible. Ware’s ecumenical vision is Christian unity that can accommodate different perspectives held together by a common Christian worldview. A Christian worldview is an important starting point for Ware’s ecumenical vision because it forces one to locate oneself in the world in terms of orthopraxis (what does it mean [action] to be a Christian), rather than orthodoxy. For Ware, orthopraxis has a better chance of uniting Christians than focus on the management of doctrinal differences. His study of black theology revealed that it has its own type of ecumenism because one of black theology’s prime purposes is to get black churches to work together on social justice issues. Black theology has resisted addressing doctrinal divisions among black churches. Ware’s ecumenical vision is also shaped by his study of religion and science. Ware believes that we have to be open to scientific developments and that religion and science help ecumenism because we must think more broadly about who we are as human beings in the context of the cosmos, not just who we are as a church on earth. Ecumenism based on doctrinal unity considers the Christian present in terms of the Christian past rather than what Christians are becoming. Ware’s concern with Christian

302

Handbook of African American Theology

religious faith and how it is shared on Earth and other places in the universe reinforces that orthopraxis is more important than orthodoxy because actions are primary and doctrine follows later. For Ware, we live first and then reflect on that experience, which also supports his stance on narrative and phenomenology. Carpenter personally envisions religious groups pooling their resources ecumenically to address global social problems such as hunger, poverty, disease, crime, environmental issues, social justice reform, and the elimination of racism. She believes that ecumenical efforts work best when Christians work side by side in the “trenches” and in so doing find that there is a great deal of common ground. For Carpenter, ecumenism and the mission and message of Christ are best exemplified when people care for and have compassion for each other. While Carpenter has experienced great warmth and welcome from Christians as well as from people of other faiths in her travels around the world, she has wondered why the collegiality does not last. For this reason, Carpenter does not view ecumenism in terms of fellowship and dialogue as useful, rather she uses the phrase “ethical decision making and future concrete action” as her methodology for productive ecumenical efforts. Carpenter’s personal ecumenical vision is Christians coming to together to determine how to make the world a better place, then using the power of unity and collaboration to end global social problems. Davis says his personal ecumenical vision “is driven by the principle of ecumenism from below, rather than ecumenism from above.” In Davis’s vision, Christians should create mutual acceptance and support for the authority of the sources of Christianity, rally around the causes that reduce the threat to being fully human, and expand ecumenism to include other faiths and those with no faith so that ecumenical activities would include human rights, ecological responsibility, and the reduction of poverty, violence, and disease, in addition to social justice. Davis does not define ecumenism because he says it must be lived—it should be a sense of mission in which faith is put to work. Davis defends his refusal to define ecumenism because Jesus defied what was understood as the Sabbath, God’s chosen people, and forgiveness among others. Davis also does not define the black church, saying that the black church is mystical in its composition. Davis purports that the common experience of black people’s humanity being challenged is a greater unifier that religious belief. The ecumenical visions of Hoyt, Ware, Carpenter, and Davis agree that organic unity should not be the goal of Christian unity. Rather, they believe that Christian unity should focus on orthopraxis, or making the world a better place by eliminating suffering and injustice. They all have different notions of what comprises the black church. Hoyt and Carpenter seem to hold a more traditional view of the black church, as the historic independent black churches. Ware sees the black church as including the historic independent black churches as well as newer non-denominational and neoPentecostal black churches, and future Christian evangelistic endeavors on other planets that have their origin in the black church on Earth. Davis sees the black church as including every black person on the planet, regardless of personal religious affiliation, or lack thereof, as the common experience of racism and injustice is a greater unifier than religious belief.

Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement

303

The ecumenical visions of Hoyt, Ware, Carpenter, and Davis include social justice for black people, or the eradication of racism and social discrimination based on skin color. All four theologians include science as a part of their ecumenical work. Hoyt and Carpenter’s scientific focus was ecological ecumenism. Davis considered ecological ecumenism, but his work also considered developmental ecumenism that used appropriate science and technology to improve the standard of living and develop businesses in underdeveloped nations. Ware’s study of science and technology, religion, and ecumenism extended to include the universe.

What personal experiences have shaped your personal “ecumenical vision”? The ecumenical vision of each of the theologians began developing during their formative years. Hoyt attended segregated schools and did not have multi-racial/ religious/socio-economic interactions until college. Hoyt’s experience of ecumenical organizations and dialogues focused on salvation history (doctrine) made him recognize that ecumenism should also include creation history, or taking care of the environment and the physical needs of God’s creation. The personal experiences that shaped Ware’s ecumenical vision were his growing up in a church that emphasized its superiority over other Christian denominations and being taught as if the denominational history of the Church of God in Christ was Christian history. Attending an ecumenical seminary also shaped his ecumenical vision whereby he was exposed to different forms of worship. His presence at ecumenical dialogues on behalf of the Church of God in Christ illustrated the different approaches to scriptural exegesis that shed light, sometimes negative, on the way Scripture was interpreted in his own church. The personal experiences that have shaped Carpenter’s personal ecumenical vision include attending Missionary Baptist, Free Will Baptist, and Pentecostal churches in her childhood and preaching in churches of various denominations during her teen years and college. While in college, she also served as the vice president of the Apostolic Club at Morgan State University. Dr. Carpenter provided leadership on Disciples of Christ denominational boards for 40 years, and because church unity is the “polar star” of her denomination, she was privy to the denomination’s activities in the ecumenical movement. As the pastor of Michigan Park Christian Church in Washington, District of Columbia, she allowed fifty students from various denominations to complete their ministerial field education at her church over the course of her twenty-five-year pastorate and participated in citywide ecumenical organizations. Unlike Hoyt, Carpenter, and Ware, Davis grew-up in a majority black country. Davis’s first lessons about ecumenical living were taught by his godfather and mother who helped people regardless of their race, religion, or ethnicity. While Davis did not experience the overt segregation experienced by Hoyt and Carpenter, there were obvious social, economic, and class differences between black and white people in Antigua. Davis participated in the ecumenical movement very early in his career as a part of the Caribbean Conference of Churches. Davis’s experiences as a black priest in the Episcopal Church expanded his ecumenical vision to see the need to work to unify Afro-Anglicans around the globe.

304

Handbook of African American Theology

What is the official position of your church in regard to ecumenical activity and what type of ecumenical activity does your church currently support? The CME Church’s involvement with the ecumenical movement was credited with helping the church move from being an accommodationist black church under white sponsorship to a politically active religious organization whose agenda expanded to advance civil rights and social justice for black people. Hoyt’s version of the CME Church break from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South was more revolutionary in nature. He says that “The CME Church got started when we said we cannot long stay in a church that says that we are property to be used at the master’s expense for us, expense against us. We said we are a people of God. We cannot stay in a church that will not let us shout, will not let us have a piece of this world’s goods.” The CME Church is currently a member of the NCC, WCC, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Bread for the World, and Church World Service among other ecumenical organizations. The Episcopal Church has also been a part of ecumenical efforts since the modern ecumenical movement began. It is involved in the NCC, WCC, and any other organizations in which the Anglican Communion participates. The Episcopal Church also engaged in bilateral dialogues with other communions including Roman Catholics, Methodists, and Moravians. Within the Episcopal Church, some local congregations engage in local ecumenical activity while others do not. Within the Anglican Communion there is an internal ecumenism among Afro-Anglicans around the world who unite around issues in church and society concerning black people. The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) began as separate religious groups led by Barton Stone in Kentucky (the Christians) and a group led by Thomas and Alexander Campbell (the Disciples), in southwest Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. The groups united in 1838 as a “frontier” religion with the goal of reuniting the Christian church. The Disciples were charter members of the Federal Council of Churches in 1907 and established a commission dedicated to ecumenism called the Council on Christian Unity in 1910.33 The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is a member of the NCC and WCC, as well as many other ecumenical organizations. Unlike the CME Church, Episcopal Church, and the Disciples of Christ, the COGIC is not a member of the NCC or WCC. Ware describes the current ecumenical position of the COGIC as narrowly focused around race and tradition. This means that COGIC’s ecumenical affiliation is primarily with black Pentecostal organizations. In the past, the church has sent observers to the WCC Faith & Order proceedings. Some of the reticence exhibited by the COGIC in joining ecumenical organizations includes past discriminatory actions shown to them by white Pentecostal ecumenical groups, the non-acceptance of Christians who have different beliefs, and the fear that engaging with other denominations will lessen the spiritual vigor of the church.

Is there any difference between your church’s doctrinal understanding of ecumenism and your own theological understanding of ecumenism? There is no difference between Hoyt’s theological understanding of ecumenism and the CME Church’s doctrinal understanding of ecumenism. Davis says there is no

Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement

305

difference between his own theological understanding of ecumenism and his church’s doctrinal understanding, but in the article entitled “Bilateral Dialogue and Contextualization”34 he also states that the deeper and fuller meaning of the demands of the Gospel of Jesus Christ will not be realized until Christendom dies. This statement seems contradictory to ecumenical efforts, but upon further inquiry it became clear that Davis’s stance was in line with his belief that religious faith arises from contextual experience. Davis is saying that true Christianity is localized. And Davis’s work has illustrated that ecumenical efforts can be specific to a region, culture, and ethnic group. The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) does not have a doctrine. Because one of the early objectives of the Christian Church was the organic unity of all Christian churches, creating a doctrinal measure of orthodoxy would have hampered that effort. Disciples only require the scriptural confession that Jesus is the Christ, son of the living God, and that Jesus is one’s personal savior.35 For this reason, church doctrine versus personal theology is not an issue for Carpenter. Rather, ecumenical efforts for organic unity have left Disciples with a culture of disappointment that the church has never merged with anyone. While Disciples have been faithful to traditional ecumenical efforts, the general focus of ecumenical dialogue has shifted to mission and Carpenter believes that this is a healthier place to be. Ware’s theological view on ecumenism departs in many ways from his church’s positionality on the topic. I say “positionality” because the COGIC does not have an official doctrine on ecumenism. While the COGIC has an Articles of Religion that affirms the oneness of the church, that same document also disapproves of the beliefs and practices of several Christian communions, including the Catholic Church and Seventh Day Adventists. Based on Ware’s interview, it seems that his theological understanding of ecumenism could be aligned with his church if the idea that the church is already one remains and if a systematic theology with a baseline Christian worldview is used to logically identify the communions that represent potential ecumenical partnership, instead of listing the communions the church finds problematic.

How would you describe the “ecumenical vision” of the black church? The biggest difference between these four ecumenists and theologians are their differing views on the future of the black church’s involvement in the ecumenical movement. Hoyt’s ecumenical vision of the black church is one that seems to endorse the status quo. He would recommend continued participation so that the “blind spots” in one’s biblical/faith tradition can be revealed and healed, and the church can work together to end suffering and pain among the poor and disenfranchised (women, immigrants, victims of racial and environmental injustice, same-sex couples) to the fullest extent possible. Ware does not currently see an ecumenical trend in the black church because the focus is often on prosperity preaching rather than social justice. Ware does acknowledge the trend of many black people leaving traditional black churches to attend nondenominational “Christian centers,” which have minimal grounding in Christian history or theology. Ware sees these new worship experiences as a form of “self-help” where members come to sing, shout, and praise God. The worship provides cathartic relief from the difficulties facing the members, but it results in no real social, political,

306

Handbook of African American Theology

or economic change. The fact that many black churches do not consider their ministries are to the whole of humanity and do not recognize or understand Christian history does not bode well for ecumenical efforts. Ware believes that the black church will eventually regain its social justice function, but cannot predict when that will happen. Carpenter’s ecumenical vision of the black church sees black churches uniting, as they did in the past, to battle social injustice based on the church’s common history of racism and oppression. She believes that the black church must be reminded of and learn about its history because that history promotes unity. Carpenter says that Martin Luther King, Jr. saw the black church as the moral conscience of America and she believes that the black church can still serve as this moral conscience because black people in the United States have a story that no one else can tell. The story of black people in the United States is not only of persecution and atrocity, but also of overcoming and being able to survive in a very adverse situation. Carpenter also sees the black church as being the catalyst to build stronger relationships with Latinos/as because their struggles are similar to blacks’ in the United States, and the catalyst to help struggling African nations. Carpenter also envisions the black church as being a beacon of light and hope for oppressed people all over the world. Davis’s ecumenical vision of the black church understands it as a mystical communion that unites black people all over the world. Davis describes the black church as mystical because over the last sixty years it has developed into various manifestations including traditional black churches, the large “mega church,” nondenominational “worship centers,” and black people who attend predominantly white churches. For Davis, the common experience of being black in a hostile society is what unites black people.

Findings How are ecumenism and racism connected in the ecumenical visions of the black church? The ecumenical vision of the black church provided by Hoyt, Ware, Carpenter, and Davis revealed that ecumenism and racism are intertwined, but in different ways. For Hoyt, ecumenism and racism are connected in the resistance of white churches to commit to long-term active engagement with black churches. The history of racism exhibited by white Christians toward black Christians also hinders interest in ecumenical efforts. Even though there are some black denominations that have participated in the larger ecumenical movement, the question always remains about the astuteness of black churches engaging in ecumenical activity with predominantly white organizations, given previous disappointments. Additionally, for Hoyt, racism and ecumenism are intertwined in the historic organizational structure of the ecumenical movement. The Faith & Order ecumenical stream generally concerns theology, and the Life & Work ecumenical stream generally concerns ethics. In the black church, church, life, belief, and practice are not separate. The difference in the way in which black and white churches tend to interpret creedal

Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement

307

statements is an example of how the structure of the ecumenical movement can lead to oppression. White churches understand creedal statements as places where there is doctrinal agreement. Black churches, on the other hand, view creedal statements not only as doctrinal agreement, but as directives for how Christians should be in relationship to each other; directives which, for the most part, have not been heeded by white Christians. Black Christians tend to intertwine secularity and religion/spirituality, meaning that one’s faith and actions must be in sync. From the perspective of black Christians, the separation of theology and ethics is what allows oppression. White Christians who intertwine secularity and religion/spirituality and still mistreat other people have interpreted Scripture and their faith incorrectly. Theology and ethics are not separable in the black church. Ware shows that although the beginning of the Pentecostal movement was ecumenical, egalitarian, and multicultural, it succumbed and conformed to social pressure, becoming a racially divided church. Although the first black and white Pentecostals were of humble means, white Pentecostals made social and economic gains that their black counterparts could not because of racism. There is not a great deal of participation in the larger ecumenical movement by Pentecostals, in general, due to their sect-typeness, but there is interdenominational activity among Pentecostal churches such as the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America which has historically discriminated against black Pentecostals. Additionally, it has been assumed by the larger ecumenical community that the theology of white Pentecostals is the same as black Pentecostals’. There has been ecumenical engagement among black Pentecostals, but it has primarily been limited to race and tradition. With Ware’s current view that the black church is focused on prosperity rather than social justice, racism and its relation to ecumenism is not an active issue. For Carpenter, racism and ecumenism are intertwined when the underrepresentation of black denominations is observed in organizations like the NCC and WCC which reflect and perpetuate racist organizational behaviors. She also believes that ecumenical efforts, particularly among black churches, would be extremely useful in combatting social justice issues. Carpenter’s book A Time for Honor uncovered a racial dynamic that demonstrated greater acceptance of black women clergypersons in predominantly white denominations. Some black denominations refuse to ordain or recognize women as ministers, so black women who want to be pastors have found leadership positions in white pulpits. For Davis, racism and ecumenism are intertwined in the Caribbean due to its history of colonialism and the Christian religion that came along with it. The issues of poverty, dependence, alienation, and imitation,36 which are related to the region’s underdevelopment, were supported by the church’s attempt to maintain the status quo and subjugation of the majority black population. Paradoxically, it was the predominantly white International Missionary Council and the World Council of Christian Education ecumenical organizations that sponsored the surveys in the 1950s which led to the Caribbean Conferences of Churches. While the Caribbean Conference of Churches was able to make some development inroads, the issues affecting the region caused by its history of slavery and colonialism (which were supported by many Christian churches in the region) were too great to be completely solved.

308

Handbook of African American Theology

Racism and ecumenism are also intertwined for Davis because the need for an Afro-Anglican Conference exists within the Anglican communion. Afro-Anglicanism represents a kind of ecumenism among black Anglicans around the world. But We See Jesus is written to the Afro-Anglican community in the Episcopal Church and references the experiences of racism and economic injustice that were experienced in the Episcopal Church. Davis sees black people, by virtue of the color of their skin, as the possessors of the God-given vocation of creating a more just world by fighting against racism, including within the ecumenical movement.

Is ecumenical engagement necessary for the black church? There is no consensus regarding the way the black church views participation in the larger ecumenical community. Hoyt believes ecumenical engagement is necessary and that black and white churches would benefit by engaging in ecumenical dialogue because the churches can help to strengthen each other’s weaknesses. Ware sees engagement as useful but not obligatory. If ecumenical engagement is to grow among black Pentecostals, the larger ecumenical movement must recognize that the theological views of black Pentecostals may not be the same as white Pentecostals’. Interest in ecumenical activity among black Pentecostals could increase if it were understood that ecumenism seeks the unity of Christ’s people (not necessarily the merger of all churches into one organization) since unity is a hallmark of Pentecostal teaching. Additionally, these educational inroads must take place at the leadership and grassroots levels simultaneously to identify people who find that ecumenical efforts meet the pragmatic organizational needs of the black Pentecostal church. Carpenter views ecumenical engagement between black churches as useful if the engagement is based on the historical understanding the churches fight against racism and oppression. The power of ecumenical unity among black churches could then be used to foster better interracial relations with brown and black people within the United States, and battle the oppression of black and brown people around the world. Although Davis was a participant in the larger ecumenical movement, he seems to support a type of contextual ecumenism that seeks to solve the needs of the people out of which the need for unity arises. Davis does not see the black church as lacking, therefore engagement in ecumenical activity outside of the black church is not needed. Rather, ecumenical activities among black people have the potential to solve issues ranging from church revival to development.

Are the ecumenical visions of the black church and white churches the same? In general, it does not appear that the ecumenical goals of white and black churches are the same. There are clear distinctions in terms of approach (theology, doctrine, ethics, morality) as well as continuing racial issues. It does appear, however, that a shift toward more interest in social justice (life and work) is occurring within ecumenical organizations. This shift is seen in the ecumenical focus of the Episcopal Church and ecumenical organizations like the National Council of Churches. If this shift toward social justice continues, the ecumenical vision of black and white churches will find

Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement

309

greater alignment. Even though many impediments persist, there are positive results that can emerge from continued ecumenical dialogue even if organic union remains unattainable or undesirable.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

7

Following Anthony B. Pinn, I have decided to use the term “black” instead of “African American,” which is now in popular use. Pinn has stated that because the black church “developed in response to racial tensions and prejudices,” the terms “black” and “white” keep this racial conflict in the forefront of the discussion better than other terms. Like Pinn, I also use the term “black church” “to denote the collective reality of black Christianity across denominational lines.” (Anthony B. Pinn, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Orbis Books, 2002), ix.) H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Meridian Books, 1929, 1965), 236. Watch Night services in black churches take place on New Year’s Eve in remembrance of those who gathered on the night of December 31, 1862, during the Civil War in order to pray and wait for President Abraham Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Watch Night services allow African Americans to recognize how far God has brought them and to ask for God’s continued blessings in their lives. Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism, 6. See The World Book Dictionary (Chicago: Doubleday, 1984), 668–9; for meanings of “ecumenical,” see dictionary.com. Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ecumenical (accessed November 25, 2009.) Please note that the theologians interviewed for this study have also made significant contributions to interfaith dialogue. Their biographies and the discussion of their work is not exhaustive and is limited to Christian ecumenical dialogue/relationships for this article. Thomas L. Hoyt, Jr. (1941–2013) earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Lane College (1962), a Master of Divinity from Phillips School of Theology of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) in Atlanta, Georgia (1965), a Master of Sacred Theology (STM) from Union Theological Seminary in New York City (1965), and a Ph.D. from Duke University in North Carolina (1975). Hoyt began his formal participation in the ecumenical movement when he represented the CME Church on the governing board of the National Council of Churches (NCC) (1972), followed by his participation in the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) (now called Churches United in Christ) (1973). In 1980, Hoyt was appointed to the Inclusive Language Lectionary Committee by the Division of Education and Ministry of the NCC. Hoyt also served on the Theological Commission and the Commission of Women in Ministry of COCU. He was appointed by the CME Church as a representative to the Faith & Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and he served as the CME delegate to the WCC meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1987, and in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1994. As a part of the NCC, Hoyt traveled to Rome with the Faith & Order delegation that visited Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. Hoyt was elected to the episcopacy of the CME Church in 1994 and selected as the 48th Senior Bishop of the CME Church in 2010. Hoyt served as vice

310

Handbook of African American Theology

president of the NCC’s Faith and Order Commission from 1995 to 1996. In 2001, Hoyt was elected to a five-year term as president of the World Methodist Council, North American Region. He served as the 22nd President of the National Council of Churches (2004–5). 8 Frederick L. Ware, (1961– ) has been an Associate Professor of Theology at Howard University School of Divinity since 2003. He has held faculty and professorship positions at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Memphis Theological Seminary, the University of Memphis, and Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tennessee. Ware earned his Master of Divinity (1991) and Ph.D. (1999) from Vanderbilt University in Memphis, Tennessee, and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from the University of Memphis. Ware wrote Methodologies of Black Theology which examines the various ways to engage in black theology. As an ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ, Ware has served congregations in Tennessee. He participated in the World Council of Churches and the Pentecostals Joint Consultation from 2001 to 2005 (with the exception of 2002) and in 2008. See http://divinity.howard.edu/fredrick_ware.html 9 Delores C. Carpenter (1944– ) began working at Howard University School of Divinity in 1982 as assistant professor of Religious Education. She became a full professor in 1999 and retired from Howard University in 2017. While working as a professor, Carpenter also served as the senior pastor of Michigan Park Christian Church in Washington, District of Columbia for more than 20 years. She has dual ministerial standing in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ. Carpenter earned an undergraduate degree in Sociology from Morgan State College, Baltimore, Maryland (1966), a Master of Divinity from Howard University School of Divinity, Washington, District of Columbia (1969), a Master of Arts in Sociology from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (1972), and a Doctorate of Education from Rutgers University, New Jersey (1986). Carpenter participated in various local ecumenical organizations and hosted over fifty ministerial field education students from various denominations during her pastorate. She participated in three consultations of the ecumenical Black Theology Project that took place at Collegeville Institute, Collegeville, Minnesota, and she participated in the Confessing Jesus Christ in North America Today ecumenical consultation that also took place in Collegeville in the late 1970s. Carpenter served as a Bible study leader at the All African Conference of Churches Convention in Ethiopia which unites all Christian churches on the continent of Africa. She is the editor of the African American Heritage Hymnal (GIA Publications, 2001) which demonstrates the ecumenical nature of black church music, and the author of A Time for Honor: A Portrait of African American Clergywomen (Chalice Press, 2001). See http://www.talbot.edu/ce20/educators/ protestant/delores_carpenter/ 10 D.H. Kortright Davis (1941– ) is a professor of theology at Howard University School of Divinity and has written two books with ecumenical themes, Emancipation Still Comin’: Explorations in Caribbean Emancipation Theology, and Mission for Caribbean Change. Davis was a member of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Committee (ARCIC), a high level ecumenical organization, for nine years. Members of the ARCIC are appointed by the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Davis has participated in the National Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission, as well as bilateral discussions with Lutherans and Methodists. Since working at Howard University, he has served as Theologian in Residence at the Hampton Minister’s Conference, has addressed many black churches on the topic of ecumenism, and has

Black Ecumenism and the Ecumenical Movement

11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

311

given the keynote address on church unity for the Peter Ainslie Lecture Series. Davis was also the Rector of Holy Comforter Episcopal Church in the District of Columbia. Ordained in 1966 as a priest in the Diocese of Antigua, West Indies, Davis was trained for the Anglican priesthood at Codrington College in Barbados by the Community of the Resurrection. Dr. Davis earned his Bachelor of Divinity from London University (1965), Master of Arts in History from the University of the West Indies, Barbados (1976), and D.Phil. from the University of London in 1979. See http://divinity.howard. edu/dr_davis.html See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 3, which describes Enlightenment philosophy as “instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both the scientific and popular European perceptions of the human race. The numerous writings on race by Hume, Kant, and Hegel played a strong role in articulating Europe’s sense not only of its cultural but racial superiority . . . ‘reason’ and ‘civilization’ became almost synonymous with ‘white’ people and northern Europe, while unreason and savagery were conveniently located among the non-whites, the ‘black,’ the ‘red,’ the ‘yellow,’ ‘outside Europe.’ In addition, ‘ . . . the rise of science (Wissenschaft) in the Enlightenment period had overthrown the biblical story of creation and replaced the authority of religion with that of reason, nature was still conceptualized as a hierarchical system (the Great Chain of Being), in which every being, from humans down to fauna and flora, had a ‘naturally’ assigned position and status. . . . At the top of the human chain in this general schema was positioned the European, while nonEuropeans were positioned at lower points on the scale of a supposed human, rational and moral, evolutionary capacity” (ibid., 5). See also C. Lorin Brace, “Race” Is A Four-Letter Word: The Genesis of the Concept (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) which explains why the biologically defined concept of race is untrue and describes the development of race across continents and time periods including antiquity, the Renaissance, Enlightenment, the antebellum United States, and postEnlightenment Europe and North America. Brace examines how anthological concepts of race were exchanged between European and North American researchers. William D. Watley, Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: African American Churches and Ecumenism (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1993), 4. Richard V. Pierard, “The Ecumenical Movement and the Missionary Movement: You Can’t Have One Without the Other” [essay online], p. 1, (accessed 1 December 2017); available at: http://www.edinburgh2010.org/fileadmin/files/edinburgh2010/files/ Resources/UBS%20Pierard%20-%20The%20Ecumenical%20Movement%20and%20 Missionary%20Movement.pdf. Also found in Frampton F. Fox, ed., Edinburgh Revisited: “Give Us Friends!”—An India Perspective on 100 Years of Mission: Papers from the 16th annual Centre for Mission Studies Consultation, Union Biblical Seminary, Pune (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 2010). R. Pierce Beaver, Ecumenical Beginnings in Protestant World Mission: A History of Comity (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962). Robert McAfee Brown, The Ecumenical Revolution: An Interpretation of the Catholic Protestant Dialogue (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 2. Samuel McCrea Cavert, The American Churches in the Ecumenical Movement: 1900–1968 (New York: Association Press, 1968), 34. Ibid., 21–2. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 41–4.

312 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

Handbook of African American Theology Ibid., 36. Sawyer, Black Ecumenism, 3. Ibid. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 15. Cavert, The American Churches in the Ecumenical Movement, 205. Ibid., 206. Robert Wuthnow, The Struggle for America’s Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989). “This theme, under either name, implies that in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other places the new churches can and should understand and express the Christian faith in terms of their respective cultures. Even more, it means that the gospel itself receives its shape in the total culture of the people among whom the church is planted and in the nation of which the church is essentially an integral part. Successful inculturation may be said to occur when the gospel and the church no longer seem to be foreign imports but are claimed in general as the property of the people.” (M.R. Spindler, “The Biblical Grounding and Orientation of Mission,” in Missiology: An Ecumenical Introduction, F.J. Verstraelen, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 139. In this article, Spindler explored the problems in the relationship between Bible and mission.) Nicholas Lossky, et al., eds., Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1991), 195. Dr. Hoyt’s interview took place on November 26, 2012, Dr. Ware’s interview took place on May 18, 2013, Dr. Carpenter’s interview took place on August 8, 2017, and Dr. Davis’s interview took place on May 7, 2013. Kenneth L. Teegarden, We Call Ourselves Disciples (St. Louis, MO: The Bethany Press, 1983), 21. Kortright Davis, “Bilateral Dialogue and Contextualization,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 23, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 386–99. Teegarden, We Call Ourselves Disciples, 47. Kortright Davis, Emancipation Still Comin’: Explorations in Caribbean Emancipatory Theology (New York: Orbis Books, 1990).

23

Receiving the Body as Gift: African American Christian Ethics and the Harlem Renaissance as a Theo-Ethical Intervention Reggie L. Williams

African American Christian Ethics is a broad field consisting of many disciplinary strands and methods. The primary strands of African American Christian Ethics— including history, political, ecclesial, economic, and aesthetic— are engaged by different methodologies, black, black womanist and feminist theology, and ethics, each sharing an emphasis on embodied life and social encounter as the departure point for determining Christian moral faithfulness.1 The field draws from multiple disciplines to diagnose the factors that impact black life in the Western world where black life has been subject historically to the moral problem of whiteness. The ideology of human difference that gave rise to whiteness as the operative norm for knowing all things related to heaven and earth was developed to stabilize the transatlantic slave trade as moral, even a sacred good. Any analysis of black religious life in the Western world must take seriously this tragic history with an interdisciplinary analysis if it is to offer a meaningful study of African American religious life. The Harlem Renaissance literary movement offers this kind of analysis. The Renaissance includes multiple modes of inquiry as a diasporic Afro-cultural production that included theo-ethical imperatives. It provides an illustration for the argument that is made by African American Christian ethics; Christian ethics must not be an endeavor for ethical norms that focus primarily on the moral lives of individuals, but on removing the obstacles that prevent our ability to live together as community.

Barriers with sacred foundations The Renaissance in Harlem was addressing a construct that began with the encounters between Europeans and kidnapped Africans. I had the privilege of reexamining that history when I was co-teacher for a course in Ghana to a group of gifted Doctor of Ministry students from my seminary. One particular moment in the seminar can help to illustrate the sacred foundations of whiteness that serve as obstacles to real social encounter and community.

314

Handbook of African American Theology

The terror for kidnapped Africans was more than the middle passage. The route through unspeakable brutality for kidnapped Africans known as the middle passage is infamous for its renowned horrors. It was the geographical midpoint in the process of an involuntary and unholy conversion from tribespersons in their traditional lands to possessions of white people in the deep unknown. But together with my students in Ghana, we learned that the middle passage was one in a series of terrible chapters in the horror story of the invention of Negroes. Their ambush in Africa was the first awful chapter in this story. Killing was routine in the process of acquiring people to sell. Those who were captured were the survivors of that horrific first struggle. The survivors were marched for months, always at night in chains to disorient them, and in the heat that is always present in West Africa. People died during the long march to the dungeons and the slave ports. On the Gold Coast, once the survivors neared the area designated by the traders in human flesh, they underwent a ritual of the trade that, from all appearances, simulated the two Protestant sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Those sacraments acknowledge the soteriological nature of the Savior’s death and the interaction between heaven and earth in the church. But in that initial encounter between white people and kidnapped Africans, the sacraments served as description of the bent reality within the white slaver’s theological and ethical hermeneutic. Slave traders bathed their captives and gave them a morsel of food at a location that is today called the “Slave River” near Elmina. It was the only such moment for them before they passed through the infamous door of no return in the course of entering the slave ship. The bath functioned like a baptism into a new being. Their tribal understanding of themselves, connected to their people, their traditions, and their land, died in the water and they were raised anew as Negroes, with their identity placed wholly on their skin.2 The baptism was a de-creation; it was a moment when the white European enacts sicut deus, or “like god” with his spoken as another word of creation over the land and the bodies of its inhabitants, making something different from what God has made. The slave trader made Negroes from Africans. His word pronounced the desires of a god fashioned in the image of white men, the sovereign and ascendant one from Europe whose spoken word brought into existence all of creation, and he described human life in relationship to himself. In Africa, he forced the black African world to submit in obedience to him, and take upon itself his reality as its own. At the Slave River, European traders in human flesh baptized African people into a new reality. When they came out of the water they were given food to eat. It was often the only food they received in the long march towards the bath and the dungeons. The intent was not to satisfy their hunger but to aid their appearance as they were being readied for the market. It was a capitalist engagement with the body that functioned as the second of the two sacraments that Protestants celebrate in our liturgy. It was a twisted communion that placed bodies in the overlay between capitalism and democracy, where political policies serve to undergird economic interests and provide ideological justification for the financial transaction as a sphere separate from moral consideration, i.e. “it’s just business.” In this combination, the interests of the market for cheap labor were synthesized with the goals of the emerging state, and the bodies of the newly

Receiving the Body as Gift

315

invented Negros were received with eagerness as the fungible goods of merchants and private citizens within the newly emerging economy of the global West. The food of this crooked communion was a mechanism to facilitate the transaction. They took the body but it was not a celebration; it was a curse to help facilitate their transaction with the sovereign European. Some of them were sold on the spot to merchants in waiting, while the remaining majority were transported to the slave dungeons at Elmina. The building at Elmina was a place of exchange and worship. The slave dungeons were in the bottom of a fortress that included housing for buyers as well as sleeping quarters for soldiers who were given charge of maintaining the castle. The soldiers’ chapel was just above the women’s dungeon, and at Cape Coast castle, the other slaving fortress in Ghana, it was directly over the men’s dungeon. The worshippers in the chapels and the captives in the dungeons could hear one another and smell one another, as daily horrors and worship went on in that structure, simultaneously. The white inhabitants of the castle were unmoved by the putrid smells and sounds of suffering beneath them. They retained their proximity to suffering comfortably on the strength of the narrative they espoused about the commodities that were suffering in the dungeons. This was the place where the worship was made real. Embodied African reality gave way to the distorted Christian worldview of their white captors. It was a worldview that was aided by the Enlightenment that helped to craft biological anthropology as a corresponding scientific truth, wedded to theological, political, and social developments in the slave trade. White Christianity, sutured to the practices of chattel slavery, adapted their sacred devotion to cruelty as they pulled terrified Africans into a marketplace of competing truths, and accumulating capital in the imperial West. Centuries of this practice served to settle European imperial white men as the idealized image of the human. White masculinity was invented as the template by which all other human life is measured, and humanity is identified in aesthetic proximity to this divine ideal. In the wake of the transatlantic and the internal slave trades, we are left with this twisted ideology of human difference. In Western theological traditions of Christianity where the concept of whiteness and patriarchy and the forces that assembled it are not addressed, Christians remain within this historical reality as the operative norm for their sacred devotion to God and country. In light of this history, embodied life and social encounter become a necessary correction to idealized concepts of humanity and to politically driven market forces. Embodied life and social encounter are necessary corrections and a healthier starting point for determining Christian moral faithfulness. Attempts to give an account of the Christian moral life that minimize or ignore embodied encounter lead to the historical problems of domination and oppression that are characteristic of white supremacy in the Western world.

The Harlem Renaissance as an intervention White supremacy is a compound form of oppression that centers white heteropatriarchy as the divine ideal around which to build ideal communities. To do the work of African American Christian Ethics is to do the work of recalibrating what it means to be human and Christian over against the harmful ideals set in place by the distorted

316

Handbook of African American Theology

historical practices that arranged white wealthy masculine hetero-normativity as template humanity. We must destabilize this figure as normative and remove the obstacles it has put in place for recognizing real human life over and against itself as the ideal. To destabilize this figure as normative is to do the work of removing the obstacles that prohibit real encounters with each other, encounters that allow us to be together in community. The Harlem Renaissance was a manifestation of that effort to recalibrate humanity to healthier theological and ethical representation norms. That movement included an Afro-diasporic cultural production that was theological and ethical, and it introduced into the broader public an engagement with human life that was other than the routine racialized depictions of black people from the imagination of whites. The black cultural product from the Renaissance offered something different, something other and concrete, something real. Intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance demonstrate for us the theological and moral importance of embodied social encounter for knowing and being over and against the harmful epistemological frames set in place by dominant power narratives. The concept of morality that qualifies people and behavior as good and bad is the pious obsession of the creature who has become sicut deus, or like God with the knowledge of good and evil after leaving behind a seamless relationship with God, with mate, and their creaturely limitation.3 Personhood as autonomous self-possession is no longer bound in creaturely relation to God and God’s word; it has fallen and become the self reflecting on the self in a hermetically sealed circle. It has become disfigured humanity that is no longer free for others but is bound to self, and to its own creative word, which is death. Intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance clarify the problem even further by focusing our attention on the political and religious impact of the pious sicut deus as he emerges from the community of empires in Europe. From this vantage point we see the autonomous, sovereign, sicut deus as an idealized white masculine fetish who, to quote Dubois, views himself in “ownership of the Earth forever and ever, Amen!”4 And by his word he speaks into being all others in relationship to himself. He is the only one gifted with the image of God and burdened with the task of saving the world. He crafts a God in his white masculine pious image and demands that the world worship him. The theo-ethical task within the Harlem Renaissance includes the uncoupling of whiteness and divinity, toward an understanding of co-humanity for the purpose of removing obstacles that prohibit our ability to be together in community. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement of intellectual activism, addressing the lives of black people in a world shaped by whiteness. For centuries, a white aesthetic was critical for helping to stabilize racist ideals as the moral standard for understanding the world and the people in it. European enlightenment intellectuals framed an argument for the connection between beauty and morality, that beauty is the symbol of the morally good, that mobilized a white aesthetic as they were simultaneously inventing the Western world’s ideology of human difference as biological anthropology and scientific racism.5 They gave to the world a racialized gaze that fastened race, culture, beauty, and morality together as a biologically occurring reality. Their racialized gaze boasts of the ability to enable white observers to determine the character, culture, and cognitive abilities of the viewed racialized subject. This aesthetics of whiteness

Receiving the Body as Gift

317

worked to stabilize racist anthropology as normative as it grouped people into categories that it characterized as the intrinsically moral and the intrinsically immoral; those who are biologically predisposed toward goodness and virtue, and those who are biologically immoral and criminal; those who are a law unto themselves and those who must have the rule of law imposed upon them; those who are natural rulers and authority figures, and those who are naturally hewers of wood and drawers of water; those who are gifted with intellectual abilities and those who are dumb as rocks; those who are gifted with the image of the Divine and burdened with the task of saving the world, and the heathen who need the religion and culture of the holy ones. This configuration speaks of something essential about types of beings that is aesthetically identified and mapped onto our bodies as indication of who and what we are and the boundaries of our potential. White is always already good, and black is the antithesis of good. This is the narrative of race, which is also always accompanied by other intersectional oppressions. It was birthed as an aesthetic that depended upon the most sophisticated reasoning of its time. This was the narrative that was stabilized during the transatlantic slave trade and at the beginning of the United States. It is a bio-political organizing scheme, a financially incentivized anthropology that claims others as epistemological possessions. To be specific: the white aesthetic seized, marked, and claimed epistemological ownership of African bodies as it worked to stabilize white masculinity as the divine ideal, and the template for all of humanity. In this conceptual rendering, one’s humanity is measured in aesthetic proximity to the divine ideal. In practical terms, the narrative of human difference operates according to stereotypes that teach us to know one another in the abstract, as comparisons to the ideal. Real social interaction is rendered mute, and authentic humanity is taken for granted in service to the conceptual paradigm that racism has crafted as actual knowledge of one another and guide to our social interaction. We are left with distortions to guide our encounters with one another. The result is a social imaginary formed by the practice of epistemological ownership of others by idolizing a white masculine sovereign who turns social encounters into acts of consumption, and people into objects of desire, or nourishment to feed his selfreflection. Theologically it is a heretical accounting for the body of Jesus in devotion to a fetishized being who arranges all of life in light of himself and masquerades as the central figure of Christian devotion. The social implications of worshipping this figure results in a desire for an idealized community and way of life, a longing for Mayberry, that captures others within an enclosed hermeneutical cycle of limitless self-reflection, prohibiting freedom for others, always only free for the self. Instead of real people within the scope of our moral responsibility, making possible social communion with others, we have abstract images of people to guide our moral interaction, and we are led by what Willie Jennings described as a diseased imagination.

The criteria for Negro art and the imperative of a black aesthetic Two figures from the Renaissance make clearer what I have been saying thus far. Here I refer to Sterling A. Brown and W.E.B. Dubois. In 1933, Sterling Brown was a prominent

318

Handbook of African American Theology

literary scholar teaching in the English department at Howard University when he published an essay titled “The Negro Character as seen by White Authors.”6 The essay is another human taxonomy of sorts, one that is an accounting of historical efforts to stabilize white masculinity as ascendant by abstract depictions of black people. Brown narrates seven types, as epistemological efforts, to mark and to own black people: 1. The contented slave was the condition of the Negro under the authority of the benevolent white sovereign. As Brown says, “Black people were contented during slavery, and it was best for them and their subordinate intellectual, mental, moral, spiritual, and physical constitution.” 2. The wretched freeman is the condition of the Negro outside of his natural state of slavery. Negroes are essentially dependent upon white people who are superior in every way. The wretched freeman was necessary for the argument/story about the contented slave. This was also the condition of the Negro upon escape to the North longing to return to the land of cotton in Dixieland. 3. The comic Negro is a paternalist, cruel image of a type that is significantly distant from whites in capacities for civilized, intellectual, and moral living. The comic Negro is a stereotype of black people trying to get along in civilization, and it is comical as they make an effort to be civilized; their dress, misuse of big words, etc. Here we see that any departure from the white norm is amusing, and that any attempt to enter the special provinces of whites, such as wearing a dress suit, is doubly so. 4. The brute Negro is the regressed condition of black people during and after reconstruction, out from under the parentage of the benevolent white sovereign. During slavery the Negro was a docile, domesticated mastiff. In reconstruction he became a mad dog. 5. The tragic Mulatto is both one finally regarded with sympathy due to her likeness to whites and one torn apart by warring biological dissimilarities. Race mixing crosses a tragic boundary creating a pitiful creature, simultaneously beastly and ill at ease with sub-humanity. Hence, the mulatto is vindictive and rebellious, a victim of a divided inheritance and therefore miserable; she is a woman without a race, worshipping the whites and despised by them, despising and despised by Negroes, perplexed by her struggle to unite intellect with black sensuousness. 6. The local color Negro is provincial, quaint, colloquial, local. This type winds up being a local manifestation of any of the other general types. “Stereotyped, and locally interpreted, they show peculiar differences of certain Negroes in welldefined localities.” 7. The exotic primitive corresponds with liberal whites’ rebellion against Victorian puritanism. “Literary critics urged a return to spontaneity, to unrestrained emotions and the pendulum swung from extreme Victorian prudishness to that of modern expressiveness. To the authors searching ‘for life in the raw.’ ” What is missing here is a description of the mammy and the jezebel. The stereotypes are gross generalizations that become forms far removed from a normative, civilized,

Receiving the Body as Gift

319

white masculine template that is the defining figure of the human. They are distant divergences from the central, normal human figure, with their exaggerated flaws, that highlight the absence of key humanizing character features that are present in the white-as-normal-human, and help to identify the humanity of the human, i.e. white people, and the inhumanity of the Negro. White authors craft and disclose a general interpretation of black people in a white supremacist society, as anthropologists describing black life even to black people. They police the borders of human difference, describing all human life to the world. But the process of “knowing” human beings is not from encounter with them or healthy understanding of them; it is invention. The end of this way of thinking in a white racist Christian society is a stabilized hierarchy of human beings that gives logic to ritually cleansing society of its impurities. As womanist theo-ethicist M. Shawn Copeland argues, after the Civil War whites conflated blacks with satanic presence, what Sterling Brown calls the brute Negro, and “lynching was the instrument by which black bodies were to be purged from the white body politic.”7 The twisted outcome is an absurd contradiction. As Copeland argues, white people deliberately associated the scapegoat sacrifice of black people with the mocked, tortured, crucified Christ. Copeland quotes James Cone’s description of the nefarious incongruity with reference to the cross: “Christianity’s central symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death became identified with the crucifixion of the Negro.”8 Consequently, it was not the historical death of Christ outside of the city walls of Jerusalem, but the ongoing crucifixion of black people in the US that became the dominant symbol of white American racist civil religion. This heretical tradition of Christianity is an unceasing presence within the imagination of a white racist public. It is in the process of naming the distortion that we begin to find our way forward toward a healthier normativity. The black cultural production that emerges from the Harlem Renaissance offers a different aesthetic, one that was developed over centuries of irrepressible cultural vitality from kidnapped Africans as they bridged different African ethnicities, working to develop new cultural systems, modes of identification, and connection. In their seminal work on African American culture, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price tell the story of slaves with stars in their hair. On the coast of Suriname, South America, as enslaved Africans were brought out of the ship’s hold, it was apparent to onlookers that the people had stars and half moons shaved into their hair. It was not something that was done to them, as, “Having been stripped as much as possible of their preexisting cultural armament, they had to replace it with something, to put some stylized barrier between themselves and the new social forces with which they would be forced to contend.” Instead of entering the new world in the manner of the animals they were thought to be, unmarked by the self-conscious creation of meaning, the people in the hold, from a collection of different ethnicities, “found common cause in the essentially human act of aesthetic fashion.”9 They literally remarked their bodies in the slave hold with broken glass, using what they had at hand both culturally and materially to cobble together a black aesthetic for embodied encounter. They were insisting on agency, on beauty, on meaning in the face of death and disfigurement. The story is reportedly an eyewitness account of the seminal formation of an African American aesthetic that was occurring within the black Atlantic, even before Africans made it to the shoreline of the Americas. It continues to develop into the

320

Handbook of African American Theology

modes of social connection and belonging that we see en masse displayed in the Harlem Renaissance movement. In 1926 W.E.B. Dubois told a Chicago audience about the importance of a black aesthetics. He was speaking at a function for the NAACP and the title of his lecture was the criteria for Negro art. During that speech he said that the depictions and the images of black people given to the world by white people are distorted and deformed. If those images are all that the world has, they only serve as harmful propaganda to affirm the ascendancy of white people and the inhumanity of black people. In order to address this one-sided use of propaganda, Dubois argued that artists and intellectuals must pick up their paintbrushes and pens and describe the black people they knew. Thus, he argued, [I]t is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of Beauty, and what have been the tools of the artist in times gone by? First of all, he has used the Truth— artists have used Goodness—goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor and right. . . . The apostle of Beauty thus becomes the apostle of Truth and Right. . . . His freedom is ever bounded by Truth and Justice, and slavery only dogs him when he is denied the right to tell the Truth or recognize Justice.10

With this claim that beauty is in the service of truth and justice, he commissioned black artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance to go about their work of a different cultural aesthetic, one founded in reality, taking concrete human encounter as the point of departure for moral interaction rather than abstract notions of the good that are historically pressed into the service of epistemological slavery. A black aesthetics must speak the truth about our humanity as apostles of beauty. Where do the apostles of beauty do their work? The four walls of a church cannot hold the moral claims of a black theo-ethical accounting of the body. It is an expression of the religious that is beyond the categories of the sacred and the secular. In this accounting, our encounters are open to being with and for one another in an ecstatic, dynamic accounting of co-humanity. Life is the text and the open encounter is where it is read.

Receiving the body as gift The intellectual and the artistic activists of the Harlem Renaissance make black bodies the representation of Christ on the cross. To borrow from Womanist theologian Joanne Marie Terrell, the black representation speaks from within a tradition that has believed that there are no limits to the lengths God will go to join in solidarity with the socially and politically despised.11 This tradition of Christ in solidarity with blackness on the cross is different than the black bodies placed on the cross through the creation of whiteness and the heretical ritual cleansing of white space; it is a practice of anamnesis, of remembering, or remarking black people with the sacred. Representing Christ on the cross as black demands that we make apparent the lives of people relegated to invisibility and non-being as their existence and their suffering go morally unaccounted for.

Receiving the Body as Gift

321

Biological markers like skin color, within a sick theological anthropology, are indicators of different levels of social worth and moral responsibility. An African American theo-ethical accounting for the body is an intervention against the history spun in motion with the transatlantic slave trade, and helps to facilitate the necessary deconstruction of those harmful ideologies by recalibrating our understanding of the human and the moral. A healthier theological ethics must make social interaction the point of departure for interpreting the way of Jesus, and it must enable us to see the suffering body. The act of remembering calls to mind an interaction with the Holy Communion and reception of the body of Christ as gift, not as fungible goods, as products for consumption, or economic transaction. The gift of Christ’s body in the Holy Communion invites us to an encounter with one another that re-members the body that carries the marks of physical and epistemological violence. Copeland describes the Holy Communion in this way to argue for living the Holy Communion as praxis of discipleship, what she calls “Eucharistic Praxis,”12 in solidarity against oppression. By orienting our lives in this way, in praxis of Holy Communion as solidarity, we open ourselves to doing the work of removing the obstacles that prohibit our ability to really encounter one another and to be together in community.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9

Reggie L Williams and Eboni Marshall Turman, “Life in the Body: African/African American Christian Ethics,” Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics (forthcoming). Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 134. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 3 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007). W.E.B. Dubois, “The Souls of White Folks,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Dover Thrift Publications, 1999), 17–29. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The architects of biological racism and scientific racism, including Immanuel Kant, Carl Von Linnaeus, David Hume, Johan Friedrich Blumenbach, and Voltaire to name a few, were instrumental for the ideology of difference that legitimized whiteness as a hierarchy of human beings with white masculinity as perpetually ascendant. See also Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997). See “The Negro as Seen By White Authors,” in A Son’s Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, 149ff. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996). M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 120. See James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), as quoted in Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 121. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), as quoted in Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 1–2.

322

Handbook of African American Theology

10 W.E.B. Dubois, “The Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson, 317–25 (New York: Random House, 1999). 11 See Joanne Marie Terrell, Power In The Blood: The Cross in the African American Experience (Ossining, NY: Orbis Books, 1998). 12 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 107ff.

24

Theology, Praxis, and Leadership: Paradigm for Black Churches Forrest E. Harris

Statements by Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. and from the document of Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies are at the same time disturbing and hopeful for those who owe their faith heritage and Christian spirituality to the black church. Professor Glaude claimed: The death of the black church as we have known it occasions an opportunity to breathe new life into what it means to be black and Christian. Black churches and preachers must find their prophetic voices in this momentous present. And in doing so, black churches will rise again and insist that we all assert ourselves on the national stage not as sycophants to a glorious past, but as witnesses to the ongoing revelation of God’s love in the here and now as we work on behalf of those who suffer most.1

About two decades prior to Professor Glaude’s assertion about the death of the black church, the Kelly Miller Smith Institute identified a moment of critical choice for the black church: We have come to a moment in the 373 years of our pilgrimage in North America when we must make a decisive choice for life or death. Death means turning our backs on our historic identity as an African people transplanted on this soil by sinful people . . . and our perennial struggle for justice and equality. Life, on the other hand, means affirming and celebrating the spiritual inheritance passed down to us from a kidnapped, tortured, and enslaved people who were determined to be and to become in spite of every attempt to dehumanize them.2

To speak of the possible life or death of the moral voice of black churches in a twentyfirst-century context of multiplex forms of political evils and social oppressions is a painful acknowledgment, even if the reality is questionable. I am a spiritual son of a black church in Shelby County, Tennessee—Spring Hill Missionary Baptist Church. My Christian roots are inextricably woven into the long (125 years) ecclesial tradition of that

324

Handbook of African American Theology

church’s activism, struggle for freedom, and wholeness of mind, body, and soul. The church’s public actions and social witness were persuasive theological and ethical formations in my life. In the early 1900s Spring Hill Missionary Baptist Church pastor, Brady Johnson, led the church to purchase 50 acres to build a public elementary school, civic club activities, revivals, Sunday worship celebrations, black preaching, singing spirituals, and testimonies from the pew are memories that inspire hope even to this day. The witness of black Christianity that brought to life faith in my formative years still nurtures my hope in the midst disturbing signs of black religious denominations’ general abandonment of the freedom and justice prophetic tradition that birthed black churches on American soil. Fifty years ago, I was a college student when the moral activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. invigorated the ministry and leadership of black churches, breathing new life into its ecclesial practice. The prophetic tradition of black Christianity from which King drew for prophetic imagination is a rich resource to renew moral praxis under a new ecclesial paradigm for contemporary black churches—to articulate it, value it, and refine it for action and reflection in ministries of care, liberation, and leadership is the concern of this essay. I address this task in three distinct areas: 1) Theology—for black churches to reject internalized oppression of dominant interpretations of reality through the exercise of critical consciousness and human agency; 2) Ministry—reflection and action upon the social domain of oppression to transform it; and 3) Leadership— emancipatory models for social justice that seek to humanize systems through profound love for people and the community.3 Through the liberation lens that grounds black and womanist theology, these areas suggest a way black churches can do theology, authenticate and enrich personal and public faith, and align Christian vocation with the deployment of moral praxis for social transformation. In the assumed life-or-death moment of the black church, reconnection to the markings of the black Christian tradition to empower human agency is not only necessary for renewal of ecclesial practice, it is critical for the transformation of the communities the black churches serve and for the need to humanize oppressive systems for the well-being of life under an American democracy. Before proceeding to elaborate on what I outline as a moral praxis paradigm for renewal of black church ecclesial practice, a few more introductory comments are appropriate to the topic. Kelly Miller Smith, Sr. was dean of black church relations at Vanderbilt Divinity School when I was a Vanderbilt graduate student. He was pastor of Nashville’s First Baptist Church Capitol Hill in the 1960s and a lieutenant of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I was fortunate to have Smith as a teacher and mentor. Many years later, I would have the honor of being the first director of Vanderbilt’s Institute on Black Church Studies named to honor his legacy of prophetic and pastoral leadership. Before Smith’s death in 1984, his Yale Lyman Beecher Lectures were published under the title Social Crisis Preaching; in that book he stated, “No mere recital of a few of King’s accomplishments can exhaust the meaning of King. The essence of his prophetic hope and praxis cannot be accomplished simply by celebration of his birthday.”4 Smith was a keen observer of white America’s race logic and its abiding loyalty to patriotic absolutism and white supremacist values. Spot on is Smith’s thesis after nearly fifty years of seeing the domesticating of King’s prophetic witness and message. He understood that power resides in the system to counteract the potential that lies in people to name and transform their reality. In my current roles as

Theology, Praxis, and Leadership

325

president of a historically black college and a theological educator, Smith’s prophetic hope and moral praxis ground my teaching and leadership activism. Following the ministry of King, the strength of Smith’s prophetic ministry was its praxis character (love in action) in the middle of social crisis. The essence of King’s moral praxis became a contagious form of empowerment for church leaders like Smith and the black community to enthusiastically join King in the Memphis garbage workers’ protest. Since the murder of King, April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Loraine Motel in Memphis, the prophetic presence and power of liberation in the leadership and ministry of black churches is declining as its central ecclesial identity. Perhaps this among other considerations that we will discuss later, has created the life-or-death moment for the moral voice of the black church. A few weeks before his death, the last words Kelly Miller Smith, Sr. spoke to me were “I am claiming the victory for our people.” Smith’s statement resonates with similar words King made the night before his death—“we as a people will get to the Promised land.” I heard this overtone of hope in a prayer father Wilbur T. Harris, a church deacon for forty years, speaking the day before his death: “I pray that the next generation will have the faith.” By probing the theology, moral commitment, and human agency behind these sage words of hope, I believe new life may be breathed into the black churches’ ecclesial practice and understanding of what it means to black and Christian (women and millennials) in America.

Theology for black churches One of the ironies of American history is that plantation slaves, indoctrinated with the oppressive ideology and religion of their slaveholders, discovered the meaning of the Jesus of history and the essence of the Christ of faith—life and freedom under God. This discovery in secret gatherings of “the invisible church bush harbors” where “the souls of black folk” sang, prayed, preached, and worshipped the God of freedom became spaces for affirming human agency and the primal ways of theologizing alternatives to oppression. They were spaces of origin of the black church and what we now call black theology. Thus, the matriarchal and patriarchal wisdom and activism of black Christian ancestors such as the plantation preacher Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnett, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Dubois, Howard Thurman, Benjamin Mays, Mary McCloud Bethune, and Martin Luther King, Jr. have a vote or say in what doing theology means for the contemporary black churches. The need arises in the twenty-first-century black churches for reclamation of ecclesial markings of freedom as a theology for broadening a vision of moral praxis in the face of life-and-death (social and spiritual) realities of oppressive social determinants impacting black life today. We live in an era of ignorance, bigotry, and the abuse of power—a dangerous cocktail in the highest places of American government that threatens not only the continual demonization of “Black Lives Matter” but also the future hope for a just democracy in America. Black theology is bound by the prophetic antecedents of black Christianity to tell the truth about race and power. New York Union Seminary Professor James Cone, the face of black theology in the United States, describes himself as a “theological activist”—addressing “the challenge

326

Handbook of African American Theology

that race poses for faith,” and the attenuating social conditions of white supremacy and racial injustice. Cone believes that “white supremacy challenges not only the Christian faith but also our faith in humanity.”5 Cone’s publications on black theology constitute a library for the black churches’ Christian education program to understand the corruption of Christian practice as it relates to American Christianity’s complicity with racism. His most recent award-winning book, The Cross and Lynching Tree, speaks to not only the corruption of Christian practice but the complicity of white Christianity in the evil outcomes of racist systems on black life. One such system is the modern form of lynching of blacks being brutalized and executed on the streets by police, and the cradle-to-prison pipeline which according to Michelle Alexander is America’s new racial caste system.6 The response to the evil of a prison racial caste system and the constitutive social realities of poverty, poor public education, employment, and crime is germane to the need for emancipatory action and reflection, which I frame here as moral praxis for black church theology, leadership and ministry. The term “emancipatory” connotes internal and external liberation—the presence of oppressive psychological factors that continue to shape assumptions, values, attitudes, and behaviors from which black churches need internal liberation; and these traits’ attenuating effects on the black community’s need for external liberation. The need for black internal and external liberation is woven into the perpetual endemic racism of the white supremacy character of American life. After the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, white supremacy is still embedded in the social fabric of the nation.7 Thus, the oppressive systems and structures that demonize and destroy the life chance of the black poor pose a serious challenge for the moral and prophetic witness of the black church. For this discussion, I define a theological method for black church activism as pragmatic spirituality, a praxis focus on the lived experiences, oppressions, and communal hopes that shape the moral decision-making of black churches. The emphasis here is on the words “pragmatic” and “moral”—the life-giving, liberating effects and changes in the spiritual and structural world of the community that occur in a cycle of reflection and action. In other words, how does black theology bridge critical contested issues of race and culture at the center of black life to ministries of liberation and care? I suggest here that activist black church leadership and ministry must take the form of an ecclesial paradigm or Christian logic for pragmatic moral praxis, that is, efficient moral action. A relentless, clear-eyed moral praxis is perhaps the only tool that can effectively build human agency and give black people meaning and power to address the absurdities of daily assault and repression in black life. Black Churches, in the words of Kelly Brown Douglas, connect the suffering of “black bodies to the justice of God” which is a call that demands response in the form of black church activism, vocational commitment, and moral praxis. Black and womanist theologies have always been theologies of freedom and care for black bodies. Black theology’s critique of racism and oppression in classical texts of American theologies has changed the direction of theological discourse emphasizing liberation and justice as instruments for moral praxis. Unfortunately, black theology’s infiltration into the education venues and the religious mindset of black church denominations and their constituent churches has yet to effectively counteract the hold of a Joyce Myers, Creflo Dollar, Joel Osteen, and Billy Graham-type conservative

Theology, Praxis, and Leadership

327

evangelism over against the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. Resolving this problem, black church leaders and black theologians alike must recommit to open dialogue to overcome and bring to light the illuminating empowerment of the black Christian tradition in concert with exposing the theological distortions of the Christian faith. Church leaders need guidance and assistance for doing theology in a way to expose the fundamental unconscious forces that shape black life and unpack for the persons sitting in black church pews the interconnection of persons to the systems that oppressed them; particularly the role of false claims or false consciousness of Western Christian ideology in perpetuating supremacist values and human oppression. Retired professor of pastoral psychology and counseling, Archie Smith, Jr. reminds us of the debilitating and inherent dangerous effects false consciousness can impose upon the moral shaping of individuals and groups. He states, False consciousness means that an individual or an entire group has uncritically accepted the prevailing social practices of society as absolute, complete, or selfevident. False consciousness further means that a particular interpretation or social outlook has become an enshrined reality, a closed circle of certainty which precludes recognition of alternative possibilities for humanity. False consciousness functions to distort the individual’s grasp of reality and to adjust the person within the prevailing and taken-for-granted outlook of society—the over-identification with existing power arrangements and confirmation of infallibility, divine or absolute status upon the existing society.8

Smith points to the internal and external effects of oppression upon the selfconsciousness of oppressed people. A false consciousness becomes a more pronounced crisis when attempting to deal with the persistent assault of urban violence upon the black community, the proximity of poverty to mass prison incarceration, poor public education and the declining influence of the black church as an effective agent of change in the communities where they exist. I contend that the first task of a black church theology is to improve the theological and ethical literacy of the very people it seeks to liberate from forms of systemic oppression. An example of this kind of educational effort occurred during the early 1990s when Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies held a national dialogue on “What it means to be black and Christian,” a theme which became a program priority for the Institute. The Lilly Endowment, Inc. provided the initial resources for the dialogue that brought together nearly 12,000 black pastors, theologians, religious scholars, and seminarians across the spectrum of black denominational affiliations. As the facilitator of the dialogue and director of the Kelly Miller Smith Institute, I had a front seat to witness the complexities and contours of navigating the academy and the church in dialogue. I witnessed firsthand the difficulties of bridging the gap between black academic theologians and black church leaders. A clear schism, at that time, was widening between black pastors and black theologians regarding the implications of black theology for the ministry of black churches. The black church as the conservator of black culture and moral conscience of the black community was also in question. James Cone, whose publications at that time on black

328

Handbook of African American Theology

theology were receiving a wide readership and response in the academy, black religious scholar and historian Gayraud S. Wilmore, and womanist theologian and preacher Prathia Hall-Wynn came to Vanderbilt, at the initial stages of framing the consultation, to join Vanderbilt’s black faculty and a diverse group of pastors to help clarify and devise strategies to give the dialogue the greatest chance of succeeding. The inspiration and driving thesis of the dialogue became the aim of framing the dialogue in a manner that would engage all quadrants of the black community to recreate conscious awareness of the inseparable ties of black churches to the liberation roots of black Christianity, and connect the mission of the churches to the millions of black people who continue to sink in the quagmire of racism, sexism, and poverty. Looking back on that national experiment, it was certainly a dialogical project for theological reflection on the meaning of black theology for the cultural values, political interests, moral vision, and ministry action of the black churches. Among the most pressing issues that received in-depth theological attention was the relationship of black theology to the ministry and leadership of the black churches. These reflections were published in a two-volume anthology on a range of related topics including black and womanist theologies as tools for the Christian vocation of black churches.9 Several queries decades since that national dialogue still need theological reflection. Why did not black theology’s interpretation of Christianity and its implications for black church ecclesial life become embodied in the self-understanding of black Christian denomination leaders and their constituent churches? Why are black Christian denominations unprepared for prophetic responses, theologically and politically, in this post-modern era of contested racialism and injustice to impact the moral actions of communities black churches serve? Why are black congregations essentially unaware of black theology as a tool for reflecting on justice alternatives to the fundamentalist faith and nationalist agenda of white supremacy? How might the moral praxis of black churches shape liberating ministries for social justice change in the black community, and wider society? These questions are neither new ones nor are they left unaddressed in the scholarly writings of black and womanist theologies. But what perhaps has been an underestimation is the ideological hold and damage colonial legacies of Eurocentric religious belief-traditions and oppressive supremacist systems of capitalism have had upon black existence and the black Christian imagination. This ideological dilemma continues to build a wedge between the Christian imagination of black organized religion and the liberation and justice focus of black theology. As I have mentioned in a previous article, “race, class, and gender justice (the right ordering of relationships and identities for equitable reversals of oppression, poverty, and suffering) require new organizing centers of identity and praxis that shape notions of agency, identity, freedom, and politics.”10 As related to the leadership and activism of black churches, appropriations of moral praxis in a diverse and an unequal society of injustices present a complex problem for developing an activist ministry agenda to counter twenty-first-century realities of race, class, and gender oppressions. Yale Professor Willie Jennings posits this dilemma from the perspective of the Christian-colonial way of imaging the world. Jennings raises the relevant question, “How is it possible for Christians and Christian communities to naturalize cultural fragmentation and operationalize racial vision from within the

Theology, Praxis, and Leadership

329

social logic and theological imagination of [Western] Christianity itself?”11 Jennings’s observation points to the crucial need for black churches to reclaim theological paradigms commensurate with the prophetic grammar of liberation for holistic transformation of black life. As Jennings notes, “Peoples of African descent in the world bear witness to a horror. We have watched the emergence, growth, cultivation, and expansion of a white (Eurocentric) aesthetic regime that seeks to narrate the true, the good, the beautiful, the intelligent, and the noble around white bodies.”12 The problem of colonial Christian theologizing has left its influence on the black Christian imagination and acerbates the challenge of black and womanist theology to find synergy with the everyday pragmatic realities of the black life. Pastor/theologian James Harris argues that “because black liberation theology appears to be more esoteric than pragmatic, black preachers shy away from the radical view of liberation theologians and side with traditional, conservative, evangelical theologians,” against, I might add, their own need for a theological emancipatory environment of liberation.13 What theological education means for black churches is the broadening of their capacity to affirm race, sexuality, and gender identities that embody justice and liberation beyond the moral, spiritual, intellectual, environmental, and theological entrapments of Western ideological Christian logic and subjectivity; and the need for the reconstruction of a black church ecclesial paradigm for liberation and faithful pragmatic service. I propose that black church activism and leadership take the form of liberation Christian logic or theological currency for the critical task of deploying moral praxis for social change. A statement made by H. Richard Niebuhr years ago speaks to this kind of reconstruction for moral praxis: “our past is our present in our conscious and unconscious memory. To understand such a present past is to understand one’s self and, through understanding, to reconstruct.”14

Building human agency for ministry During the early stages of the Kelly Miller Smith Institute’s national dialogue some black pastors had difficulty connecting the political reality of being black in America with the evangelical versions of sacred Christian doctrine. The words liberation and black theology were problematic for pastors whose theological framework had not engaged liberation as the theological orientation of Jesus nor did the word “black” appeal as a way of doing theology that interprets the gospel in terms of its relevance to and meaning for black life in American society. This problematic is perhaps why, among other reasons, the subject matter of black liberation theology has yet to gain serious traction in the black church pew. Dwight Hopkins notes the central themes of black liberation theology as 1) who God is and what God does in the world; 2) an understanding of the historical Jesus’s message and ministry as one of liberation; and 3) theological interpretation of how the gospel of liberation is revealed in black life.15 Since the nature of theology is qualified by time, geography, culture, and the material conditions of existence, a theology for the black church’s moral praxis is first relational and seamless with the Christian prophetic tradition, and second with the life stories and lens of the lived experience of black existence. In other words, it is a way of doing theology—knowing and acting

330

Handbook of African American Theology

which arises from self-conscious and self-critical activity in concrete situations. From this perspective, Archie Smith defines ministry as being with people who are embedded in social milieus and structures that need transformation.16 It is undeniable that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in removing external constraints of racial segregation and the carryover of Jim Crow discriminatory racial voter laws. However, the Civil Rights Movement left black people’s internalized oppression largely untouched in the face of the white supremacist backlash we now see in the white nationalists’ politics of white Christian conservatism. At a personal or individual level, supremacist oppression consists of negative thoughts, attitudes, and behavior toward black and brown people. At a cultural level, it consists of the values, norms, assumptions, and particular ways of thinking, seeing, and acting that are reflected in systems, literature, the mass media, stories, movies, and stereotypes of white culture that together operate to maintain a belief in the superiority of whiteness. Thus, today the need for a self-critical and self-conscious theological engagement with black churches is essential to ground what I briefly outlined here as emancipatory or moral praxis for leadership and black church activism.17 The past three decades of black and womanist theological discourse have shown the inherent flaws in white expressions of Christianity and the false consciousness it perpetuates. What Frantz Fanon terms “the colonial wound” still lingering in the psychology, sociology, and theology of the “wretched of the earth” is a continuing interest of black and womanist theologies. This building of human agency is the crucial work for black church leaders, ethicists, and theologians working in concert against oppressive constituent realities in which these social wounds fester. Through theological publications and homiletic activism, a burgeoning field of doctoral and seminary graduates, black and womanist theologians, and an increasing number of theologically trained black pastors are addressing “lingering colonial wounds.” Kelly Brown Douglas’s outstanding book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, which is a must for black church reading, ties the origins and cultural antecedents of the Anglo-Saxon myth of whiteness as cherished property rights to the “stand your ground” laws in Florida, the perpetual character of which she cites as covertly responsible for the murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Shortly after the killing of Trayvon Martin, compelled by the fears and horror of what the “stand your ground” laws meant for the life or death of black males stopped by police, Brown Douglas was in an ethical and theological quandary: how to raise her eight-year-old son in a society defined by a narrative that tells black males that they have no value. Brown Douglas wrote the book within a sense of moral responsibility to not only expose the ideological, psychological, and emotional flaws of white privilege but to build her son’s human agency by attending to the dehumanizing myths against black bodies.18 Another example of building black human agency for black church activism is the work of Raphael Warnock, systematic theologian and pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. He argues that “the double consciousness of black Christianity,” or what he calls “the divided mind of the black church,” is a formidable barrier to the formation of critical human agency for a black church activism. Warnock’s observation picks up where the national consultation on “what it means to be black and

Theology, Praxis, and Leadership

331

Christian” left off by exploring this theological division, calling for a theo-ethical revision of black church ecclesial life and practice. Warnock advances black liberation theology’s premise of concrete historical, political praxis for the salvation of black bodies from the “sin of slavery.” On the other hand, he is attentive to the theological flaw of Western Christianity’s primary focus on “the slavery of sin.” The black Christian imagination remains unable to understand whether Christian salvation is personal alienation, the bondage of sin from which the soul needs deliverance in relationship to God and the world, or whether it is liberation from the life-destroying sin(s) of white supremacy.19 Understanding the negative consequences this division has on the moral praxis of the black church, Warnock’s theological probing seeks to resolve barriers to developing critical human agency necessary for effective liberation, ministry, and leadership. This matter is perhaps the most urgent issue facing the ecclesial identity of black church denominations. How to engage what Kent Graham describes as “relational justice” or “emancipatory liberation” in a theology of care for black bodies calls for an ecclesial shift in the mind of the black church.20 Reclaiming the theo-ethical notion of King’s concept of love seen as an “inescapable network of interrelatedness and mutuality” for personal and communal, prophetic and pastoral moral praxis is a beginning point for the theological reflection of black churches. This kind of reflection and action is happening among justice-seeking groups and organizations that are moving the locus of prophetic action from structures of denominations and sanctuaries to the streets and public spaces in protest against racial injustice. They are finding new centers of praxis for the personal, political, and public well-being of the community. Social crisis issues that demand public justice advocacy— cradle-to-prison pipeline, police violence, the criminalization and decimation of black bodies, and poverty require action and reflection or justice activism in the cycle of moral praxis. For example, the young people of the Black Lives Matters movement see the current race crisis as a moral movement of what Brazilian theologian Paulo Freire calls “conscientization”—the ability of oppressed people to name domains of oppression and humanize it. They are moving out from black church denominations’ “divided mind” and complacency, the word church and prosperity gospel’s complicity with egregious forms of capitalism and charitable community offerings that are absent a justice commitment to undo systems of racial oppression. These young people will have nothing to do with consumerist religious purchases at non-prophetic counters of the prosperity gospel movement. The more black church members become lost in the gap between the black Christian heritage of liberation and the theological conservatism and the fundamentalism of Eurocentric Christianity, the more they will as James Harris notes “continue to contribute its mite to the legitimation of the status quo,” thus giving complicit consent to their own abasement. It may be argued justifiably that, while the black churches remain gathering places for communal activities and worship, the social justice advocacy of groups like the Black Lives Matter movement, the National Black Justice Coalition (whose work centers around HIV/AIDS to make employment and education opportunities more inclusive for black LGBT citizens), and the network of advocacy church leaders, seminarians, and religious scholars brought together annually by the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference have moved the center of ecclesial moral praxis from the sanctuary

332

Handbook of African American Theology

to the streets and public spaces for policy change negotiations. Other groups such as We Are Here, a partnership of organizations founded by Alicia Keys working to end poverty, oppression, and homelessness, and Color of Change with over a million members working to end the racial injustice manifested in the media, economy, and criminal justice system, oppression and homelessness, are practicing a social hermeneutic germane to moral praxis for advancing critical human agency. The absence of this critical agency in the life of black churches seriously incapacitates its prophetic presence, or, as Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude suggests, that the black church’s moral agency may become dead amidst the twenty-first century’s “new caste systems” of mass incarceration, violence, and poverty.

Social justice leadership and moral praxis Social justice leadership, or what I have framed as leadership for emancipatory moral praxis, takes the wounds of racism and the resulting present context seriously. It is reflective and proactive leadership, liberating and empowering. It brings vision and healing to oppressed people’s psyches and aims to develop human praxis and leaders for new agency. It goes beyond filling the head and heart with devotional biblical spirituality, separate from relational justice—it summons communities to love and justice to humanize life. Furthermore, it means helping people by loving them, empowering their human agency to overcome oppressive patterns and building leadership to reverse the ill effects of history. It seeks to understand God’s activity in the complex experiences of black life by the re-visioning of black church ecclesial life to comprehend the lived spiritualties, embedded theologies, and public practices that impact black faith communities. As Walter Fluker states, “These embedded entities act as the ‘ghosts of postracialism’ desires which have come back to haunt the Christian imagination of the black churches forcing it to reimagine black religious practices for this new time of fragmented discourses.”21 I agree with Fluker’s assertion that deeper vocational justice commitments challenge the ministry of black churches for social justice leadership—to think morally and critically about the concrete and particular needs in everyday life of the black community. The black churches’ historical identity and agency, Fluker writes, “have been stymied by the shifting grounds of a post-racial era, thus forfeiting their prophetic role in the world and needs to determine whether they can effectively use race as an emancipatory instrument for new liberation practices.” My reflections on this matter suggest that the character of black church activism grounds a moral praxis for liberating service to others as an emulation of God’s justice for black bodies and love of humankind and for “the least” of our sisters and brothers.

Notes 1

Eddie Glaude, Jr., “The Black Church Is Dead,” Huffington Post (February 24, 2010), https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eddie-glaude-jr-phd/the-black-church-is-dead_ b_473815.html

Theology, Praxis, and Leadership 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

333

Kelly Miller Smith Institute, “What Does It Mean To Be Black and Christian?”, in Black Theology: A Documentary History, Vol. 2, 1980–1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, 162 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). See Nancy J. Ramsay, “Emancipatory Theory and Method,” in Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, 183–92 (Wiley Blackwell, 2011). Kelly Miller Smith, Sr., Social Crisis Preaching (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 76. James Cone, “The Challenge of Race: A Theological Reflection,” in Ethics That Matter: African, Caribbean, and African American Sources, ed. Marcia Y. Riggs and James Samuel Logan (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012). See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012). Cone, “The Challenge of Race.” Archie Smith, Jr., The Relational Self: Ethics and Therapy from a Black Perspective (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1982), 29. See What Does It Mean to be Black and Christian: Pulpit, Pew and Academy in Dialogue (Nashville, TN: Baptist Sunday School Publishing Board, 1996) and What Does It Mean to be Black and Christian, Vol. II: The Meaning of the African American Church (Nashville, TN: Townsend Press, 1998). See Forrest E. Harris, “Pursuing American Racial Justice and a Politically Informed Black Church Praxis,” in Contesting Post-Racialism: Conflicted Churches in the United States and South Africa, ed. R. Drew Smith, William Ackah, Anthony G. Reddie, and Rothney S. Tshaka (Jackson: University of Press of Mississippi, 2015). Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origin of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 65. Ibid. James H. Harris, “The Black Church and Black Theology: Theory and Practice,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, Vol. 2, 1980–1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 85. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 65. See Dwight Hopkins, “Race, Religion and the Race for the White House,“ in Riggs and Logan, eds., Ethics That Matter: African, Caribbean and African American Sources, 99–120. Smith, The Relational Self, 29. See Gayraud S. Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality: The Christian Faith through an Africentric Lens (New York Press, 2004), 225. Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (New York: Orbis Books, 2015). Raphael G. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety and Public Witness (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 3. Larry Kent Graham, “From Relational Humanness to Relational Justice: Reconceiving Pastoral Care and Counseling,” in Pastoral Care and Social Conflict, ed. Pamela D. Counture and Rodney J. Hunter, 220–34 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995). Walter E. Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in a Post-Racial America (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

25

Black Church Pastors as Chief Executive Officers: A Theoretical Reframing of the Debate Nimi Wariboko

Introduction Let me start with a contextualized variant of the typical Rabinovich joke often told by radical continental philosopher Slavoj Žižek.1 An economist asks a black Baptist minister: “Why don’t you want to try the CEO management model in your church?” The Baptist minister answers: “I would prefer not to try it for two reasons. First, I am afraid it will make me pinch pennies and appear as mean and devilish.” “But,” interrupts the economist, “you are wrong, the executive management style will create wealth for your church.” “Well,” responds the Baptist minister calmly, “that’s the second reason.” This reasoning conveys more truth than it intends to say. On the face of it, the response of the Baptist minister looks contradictory or inconsistent. But if you read between the lines carefully, you will notice that he wants to go beyond the pure pastoral administrative model and its opposite, what is now called the CEO model of executive management, to a new space outside it, beyond the historic model and its opposite. He does not merely want to negate the predicate (such as “CEO” that we attach to pastor to become CEO-pastor), but affirm a non-predicate.2 This is to say he does not want to end up as merely against CEO-pastors, which negates the traditional pastoral model, but prefers to go for something beyond mere negation. In lay terms, what the Baptist minister implies is not that he does not want to try the CEO model, but he prefers to not try it. After the emergence of CEO-pastors, amid the logic of the market in late capitalism affecting and infecting every sphere of life, there is no direct path to the original or traditional pastors. Our expectation should now be focused on non-CEO-pastors. The pastors who can resist the trend of CEO-pastors (those who are deemed the negation of traditional pastors) are non-CEO-pastors.3 They affirm the CEO-impulse (or resourcefulness, which is different from the CEO-pastor paradigm) in the management of churches, while fully conscious of the theological burden of their calling. They are open to new approaches to funding and growing their churches, but shepherding the people of their congregations remains their primary focus. This mindset reminds us of what Kant called “infinite judgment.” (We will delve more deeply into this later, where

336

Handbook of African American Theology

I will also clarify the distinction between the CEO model/impulse and CEO-pastor paradigm.) What is the new space, the space outside the hegemonic position framed by the “authentic” pastoral ministry and its negation? This new space already exists within the authentic pastoral ministry, but yet transcends the opposition that is commonly formulated. This is not the way scholars who are much smarter than me proceed in grappling with the subject of our discourse. They begin by noting the CEO model as artificial or distorted, opposed to the “authentic” pastoral model, and then proceed to proffer solutions to correct the newfangled model, with the goal of returning the church or ministry to the authentic, original pastoral model. Instead of this tried and tested way of discussing our subject matter today, let us posit that there is actually no difference between the pastoral model and the CEO model in black church ministry such that the negation of the CEO model, which itself negates the pastoral model, does not return us to the original model or to a higher synthesis. Our “return” to the pastoral model will produce what we return to. Our path to the new original is part of the new original. Let me reframe the difference between the way smart scholars approach the subject and my own thinking. They consider the CEO model or impulse as a failure, or distortion, or an alien invasion of a sound pastoral system. My position is that the CEO-impulse is something antagonistic in the heart of the system. The CEO-impulse is an excess that is generated by the actualization of the pastoral model and which in turn undermines it. The pastoral model is the whole plus its CEO-impulse (its symptom). The CEO-impulse is the name of the excess inherent in the pastoral model. So the real interesting question to ask is: What is the structural role of the CEOimpulse? The gap that separates the pastoral model from the CEO model is the gap that separates the pastoral model from itself. The CEO model is internal to the process of the pastoral model. So the proper question to ask is: How is it that the CEO-impulse appears within the pastoral model as a mode of the pastoral model relating to itself? Since the gap that separates the pastoral model from the CEO model is the same gap (resourcefulness) that separates the pastoral model from itself, the abandonment of the CEO-impulse will also be an abandonment of the pastoral model. So far, it appears I have twisted the question we are gathered here to address. And I need to turn the screw one more time. Princeton Theological Seminary has posed questions about the black church, which we as intellectuals and church leaders are called to answer, to craft programs of action. But for me the black church is not a question “but an answer to a question that we do not know.”4 It is a solution to an unknown future problem. So what is the question the pastoral ministry or the CEO model of the black church answers ahead of our gathering today? Let me now attempt to lay out my thinking on the nature of the black church that prompted me to say that the CEO-impulse is at the heart of its pastoral ministry. In doing this, I will playfully bring Žižekian thoughts, in pastiche form, into the arena of black church studies. Hopefully, at the end of the exercise or the whole essay we might get a glimpse of the past or future question of the black church (or rather its pastoral ministry) that we do not know and yet we have the answer. We will start with the name, “pastor,” as contextualized within the black church.

Black Church Pastors as CEOs

337

The name “pastor” in the black church The name “pastor” designates a practice or office with a series of properties (subpractices), but what holds all these properties or practices together is the name itself. The African American pastor in the inherited sense is a synthesis of the key leadership properties of American and African societies: from African communities he took kingship, from the White House he took President (as implied by “First Lady” of the congregation), from the business world he took the functions of a corporate manager, from politics he took oratory that mobilizes for a cause, from enslaved persons he took compassion and care, from resistance to racial discrimination he took civil rights leadership, and from pastor he took the name. The name is included in the practices it signifies. The name performs the unity of meaning of all these diverse properties or achievements.5 To put it differently, the name, or rather the power of the name, emerges as the “cause” of these properties and practices retroactively enacted by them. What new properties or practices will emerge or have emerged in the twenty-first century that will later retroactively enact the name pastor as their “cause”? Is the purely contingent financial wizardry or the Chain-Saw-Al aggressive corporate style we see today in the pastor’s suite not one of those things of the twentieth century that retroactively enacted the necessity of pastoral duties as its “cause”?

From African kings to kingly pastors The agglomeration of properties in the name is not surprising because the church was the primary institution owned, managed, and controlled by African Americans. The African American cleric was viewed as a king within his community, inheriting or appropriating the features and spirit of African kingship. As Peter Paris puts it: Among freed African Americans, the spirit of African kingship was transmitted to the clergy, whom the community viewed as their primary leaders embued with charismatic powers. . . . From the earliest times up to the present day African American clergy have been acknowledged as the titular heads of their local communities and have enjoyed the highest respect and loyalty of their people, who care for their material needs and often bestow lavish gifts on them and their families. . . . African American clergy often enjoy a regal lifestyle not unlike that of traditional African kings.6

In the period of slavery and Jim Crow laws, African American clergy functioned as the main intermediaries between black communities and white power structures, struggling to maintain harmony between black and white communities. “Thus their styles of leadership have tended to be more priestly than prophetic, not unlike that of African kings.”7 As “king” the African American pastor was the head or leader of a polity (the church as polis). The black church was a polity that took part in three forms of care of the soul: soulcraft, statecraft, and care of the soul as quest for justice and freedom.8 The political model of pastoral leadership was present from the beginning of

338

Handbook of African American Theology

the formation of the black church in the United States. We will not dwell further on this, as our focus is on the chief executive officer (CEO) model. The black church leader was not only a regal figure within the black community or within the black church as a “nation within a nation” (as E. Franklin Frazier once put it), but also a manager of its resources during slavery and the Jim Crow era. Black church clergy were managers or chief executive officers of the oikonomia, the economy of the church. At the minimum, they were seriously engaged in the rationalization of resources given the paltry funds available to the black church. Most pastors in such circumstances were characterized by resourcefulness. This means wringing out successes despite austere situations and desperately limited resources. The grinding work of these pastors still involves stretching and leveraging very limited church resources to attain seemingly unreachable goals of the church in order to create new spaces that are well suited to the church’s aspirations. Lacking the huge resources of white churches, black clergy have endeavored to actualize the aspirations of their churches or charitable organizations with little or nothing. They are forced to grope their way through. Operating in such a resource-starved environment, over time African American pastors have been forced to redefine the concept of resources. The resources of their churches are not just buildings, pews and pulpits, working furnaces, musical instruments, and endowments, but strong social relations. Resources are social assets and social capital. The key focus of management in such circumstances, as current studies of African entrepreneurs with minimal resources also show, is to secure access to and control over resources (wealth-in-people, opportunities to secure assets from friends, relatives, and well-wishers) rather than market relations.9 The allocation of funds in severely capital-constrained black churches or African firms is not necessarily the usual allocation of funds. Decision making does not start with money; it only ends with it. Based on available resources—political connections, social networks, knowledge of local situations—the managers or leaders will allocate people to manage those resources and generate creative ideas and programs. Money is then allocated to special programs or ideas on the basis of their attractiveness. Resource allocation in these kinds of organizations is an exercise in achieving a balance of these three elements: people, assets, and money. Indeed, male and female pastors in almost all black churches are carrying out the functions of chief executive officers of corporations or organizations. They might not produce business-school-type longrange plans, documents, strategic tomes, and decision templates, yet they are managers. Yes, the essence of their managerial decision making might not involve the collection and crunching of data as leaders of corporate megachurches; they do not analyze alternatives, risks, and opportunities only to proceed deliberately as a Fortune-500 CEO. Yet the traditional black cleric is chief executive officer. His management process is not always logical, systematic, and comprehensive as he only studies alternatives and opts for the one that brings him closer to the church’s goals. He is opportunistic and successively refines his goal as he goes along. He is a chief executive officer, but in a different sense from a CEO-pastor. (We need to add that the church leader is not only functioning as a pastor, but also as a CEO, as we have already noted. The CEO in him or her is not merely subordinated to the dimension of pastor, but neither is pastor directly the CEO. There is no immediate identity between the two dimensions. The

Black Church Pastors as CEOs

339

CEO is pastor at work. The CEO dimension is always related to the pastoral dimension.) The black church is not only a surrogate world (as per Peter Paris) or a nation within a nation, but also a surrogate corporation. Its management is not only ecclesiastical, but also steeped in allocating resources to at least maximize effectiveness, if not efficiency as defined by the black community. Historically pastors of black churches operated a form of the traditional pastoral model, which does not stifle the CEO-impulse, even as we cannot describe them as CEO-pastors. The commonplace thinking, which we hope to correct, is that the CEO model is an external obstacle that has to be overcome. But the analyses above show that the split is internal. We get a hint of this split or, rather, the split within the African American model of pastoral leadership model is prefigured by the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30).10 One reading of this passage suggests that the capitalist spirit of venture, risk taking, and agglomeration of surplus is not alien to the work of preaching. Many preachers, waxing eloquently, have portrayed the parable as exhorting the proper investment orientation to ministry or personal life; we are all told to throw our talents (in its old and new senses) into the circulation of exchange value in order to expand our ministries or our personal fortunes. The preachers who uphold this interpretation are knowingly or unknowingly implying that there is a capitalist mindset at work in Jesus’s teaching. In a critique of this interpretation of the parable, Žižek quipped that “preachers who expand the word of God act like businessmen expanding their business!”11 Has Žižek gone too far in his critique? No. Are we not witnesses to eloquent sermons that condemn the third servant for the “misuse” of his one talent (80 pounds of silver, 6,000 denarii that was worth 20 years of an average laborer’s yearly income)? How often do you hear the third servant being applauded for withdrawing the talent (capital) from “commercial circulation . . . from the field of (economic) power” or refusing to participate in the endless pursuit of surplus value?12 Contrary to Žižek’s interpretation, which holds that the position of the third servant is the true core of Christianity, I posit that venture, risk, and expansion are at the heart of Christianity.13 (Or at least the two tendencies are in tension; there is no path to some inorganic absence of life-tension in the organism we know as Christianity.) The parable in a sense speaks to or at least it is generally received as gesturing to the venturesome process of reaching out and “bringing” persons into the kingdom of God, spreading the good news of the Gospel. There is no way to keep the unleashed productivity of Christian expansion without the tensions or antagonism exemplified in the parable. It is utopian to think that the dynamism of Christianity is independent of its contradictory conditions of existence. It is a fantasy to think that a new order of Christianity is possible, an order that will not only preserve but also elevate to a higher level the full potential of expansion or an order that will not be linked to the capitalist logic of circulation and expansion. The capitalist logic, which is seen as a contradiction in the present order, an obstacle to an “unspoiled Christianity,” to the full deployment of the virtues of Christianity is actually inherent in it. The potentiality and dynamics of the venture-risk-expansion is not external to Christianity as an historical realization and if you take it away you will ruin the propelling power of Christian expansion or reproduction. The logic of augmentation enunciated in the parable of the talents, which is seen as an obstacle, a “condition of impossibility,” is simultaneously Christianity’s “condition of possibility.”

340

Handbook of African American Theology

Remove this obstacle and you will not get the fully unleashed drive, a stainless passionate pursuit of expansion, but a loss of the productivity or expansion itself. The obstacle as a paradoxical exception, symptom within the rational totality of Christianity, enables it to function as a universality. This very inability of Christianity to become fully itself is not a failure. Perhaps, the reaction of the master of the third servant prefigures the reaction one would get if one were to suggest a withdrawal from the entire “spirit” of venturerisk-expansion, the never-ending augmentation of believers and gifts (talents) in the kingdom of God. The Christian masters of today will see such a person as undermining the foundation of Christianity’s existence.

Traditional pastors and the CEO-impulse It is therefore wrong to categorically state that the CEO model is a negation of the pastoral model. The identity of the latter is not established through its difference to the CEO model. The difference between the models is not differential (in the precise sense, neither the identity of the CEO model or the pastoral model consists in its difference from the other. This is not a case of differentiality of signifier).14 The difference only means that the pastoral model is thwarted from within by the CEO model. The CEO model is an obstacle to the pastoral model, preventing it from achieving its full identity and indicating its inconsistency. So if we try to rid the pastoral model of its CEO-impulse we will lose the pastoral model itself. It is utopian to believe that we can maintain the healthy core (“the baby”) of pastoral ministry while we throw out the particular instances of resourcefulness that are inherent within the CEO model (“the bathwater”) that we think prevents the pastoral “essence” to be fully actualized in the twenty-first century. The truth is that the so-called obstacle (that is, resourcefulness) to the full actualization of the core is simultaneously its condition of possibility in the twenty-first century with dwindling church membership and resources. So the “resolution” of the problem of CEO attitude or dimension to church operations is not the eradication of the problem but its full admission. We have to learn to live or function in the “middle,” in the immanent gap within the pastoral model itself. Our realization of the gap—our very experience of it—is the “solution” to the problem, is the victory of the pastoral model. There are two things about experiencing the gap. First, it means accepting that the CEO model or impulse is within the pastoral model and the pastoral model is also within the CEO model. Yes, it is true that the pastoral model is subjected to the corporate model, but the pastoral model is always inscribed into its corporate model in the form of a spot of inclusion. The pastoral model both stands in and stands outside the corporate model. The pastoral model that sees or gazes at the CEO model never sees the “whole” of it. This is not because the pastoral model cannot grasp the CEO model, but because there is always a blind spot in its view of the CEO model, a stain that represents its very inclusion in the CEO model or rather that the CEO model is always already embedded in it. Second, we have to traverse the field from CEO-pastors to non-CEO-pastors without the possibility of returning to a pure or original pastoral model. We do not get back to

Black Church Pastors as CEOs

341

the starting positive determination of pastor (pastoral model) with the double negation. This follows the logic of what Kant called “infinite judgment.” Non-CEO-pastor does not negate a predicate, but affirms a non-predicate. Let us take an example from another place to clarify this point. “The soul is mortal” is a positive judgment. This statement can be negated in two ways: a) “The soul is not mortal,” and b) “the soul is non-mortal.” In the first instance, the predicate (“mortal”) is negated, but in the second case, a nonpredicate is asserted. “The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction.”15 This occurs in the same vein when we say a “person is inhuman” instead of “he is not human,” a new space beyond humanity and its negation is opened up. “ ‘He is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while ‘he is inhuman’ means something thoroughly different, namely that he is neither human nor not-human, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although negating what we understand as ‘humanity,’ is inherent to being human.”16 So, what does it really mean to traverse the field from traditional pastors to CEOpastors to non-CEO-pastors? In order to provide an adequate background for this discussion let us first define what or who is a CEO-pastor. The embeddedness of CEOimpulse in the pastoral model does not mean that all pastors necessarily evolve into CEO-pastors. Making a distinction between the CEO model (impulse) and CEOpastors is important for a nuanced understanding of the story of the black church I am trying to relate here.

The CEO model: the path from pastor to the CEO-pastor Let us theoretically map the passage from pastor to CEO-pastor using philosophical fragments of Gilles Deleuze and Žižek on bodies and organs. Deleuze formulated the term body without organ (“BwO”) to designate undifferentiated, non-hierarchical space, accenting the non-separability and immanence of all lives. This term emphasizes the equality of all organs, unbounded organs not confined in a hierarchical-harmonious body, not calcified in organization, not subordinated to a goal within an organized whole. Energies or desires flow freely in the body or the whole, ever developing in new ways to actualize their potentialities. Žižek formulated the term organs without body (“OwB”) to designate a space or body in which autonomous organs flow freely. Each organ appears to function as a partial object caught in a drive. Each organ has autonomized itself from the social body as a partial object for its own jouissance. He illustrates this concept with the story of the “Red Shoes” by Hans Christian Andersen. The main character, Karen, wears a pair of red shoes to dance and the shoes get stuck to her feet, forcing her feet to dance uncontrollably. The feet will dance under whatever conditions and her life becomes so miserable that she asks an executioner to chop off the feet, but the chopped-off feet with the red shoes go on dancing, barring her ways, even to church.17 There is a third type of body and I will name it body plus organs (“BpO”). This is a social body with the necessary organs, all organized in their proper place. This is the typical hierarchical organization, the portrait of an organic whole. Now let us apply these theoretical insights into our analysis of the transformation of the pastoral model into the CEO-pastor model. We can say that the traditional pastor

342

Handbook of African American Theology

who is properly under authority and knows the proper role of finance or management principles is operating in the mode of body plus organs (BpO). There is a central control over the direction of the church. Along the way the totality of the church could evolve or be operated as a body without organs (BwO). Is this not what the early Pentecostal churches—especially the Azuza Street-revival types—were? This form of evolution or transformation is not something that comes into the church from outside: the Christian message itself is subversive of hierarchy. The church hierarchy has fought the gospel. Indeed one of the great efforts of most church leaders and establishment theologians is to turn or dilute the emancipatory, subversive message of the gospel to harmonize with its hierarchical social body. The CEO-pastor can function in a body without organs in so far as there is a strong, proper theology guiding the management process and there is no “high power distance” between the CEO as the leader (functioning in the decentralized distributed model of a jazz band leader) and the rest of the members of the congregation.18 The CEO-impulse can be directed to human flourishing, increase in the love of God and love of neighbor. But when a CEO-pastor is in the mode of OwB, organs without body, it means a “partial object” has invaded the social body of the church, the body of traditional social practices and excellences, and mortified it. A ministerial leadership in the monstrous incarnation of OwB means profit making has become a drive in the precise Lacanian term. The church or the pastor is possessed by a strange drive to make profits, the endless continuation of circulation of exchange values. The “organs” of making money are separated from the “body” of inherited practices and virtues. There is a breakdown in the ordering of the body, and the making of profits, whereby the accumulation of surplus becomes an end in itself. (The red shoes are dancing without regard for the body.) The pastoral model is split from within and it appears that with the rise of the CEO-pastor the implicit split is explicated. This explication should not be construed to mean that the African American pastoral model is only actualizing its potentials to become what it always already was. There were contingent events and processes in the path from pastors to becoming CEO-pastors, which retroactively enacted their necessity or reintroduced the unforecloseable future into the past. I would also like to add that the explication gestures to this fact: the gap within the pastoral model expresses itself in the CEOpastor as the gap between his acts and the traditional interpretation of the duties of his office. It is a gap many theologians and church folks want to be filled by the fidelity of his managerial acts and style to their own understanding of the Bible and Christian traditions. It seems the CEO-pastor has internalized the split in the pastoral model and it is tearing him apart. The CEO-pastor now tragically represents the universal character of the split inherent in the pastoral model. Though the CEO model is embedded in the pastoral model as some kind of an inherent obstacle, being a CEO-pastor is different from being an ordinary pastor who recognizes the CEO-impulse. The problem is not pastors adopting or refining the principles of sound financial management but a pastor thinking and operating like he or she is a CEO. There is also a key difference between black church pastors as “kings” (or “queens”) in the past and now. In the past the pastors were kings because others, their congregational or community members, treated them as kings. As Karl Marx puts it: “One man is king only because other men stand in relation of subjects to him. They,

Black Church Pastors as CEOs

343

on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is king.”19 Today, many black pastors think they are kings “in themselves.” This is the precise definition of madness by Marx and Lacan. When a beggar thinks of himself as a king, according to Lacan, he is insane. Lacan goes on to add that a king who begins to think of himself as a king is also mad.20 I will add that a pastor (working with the CEO model) who thinks he is a CEO “in himself ” is a madman. The board of deacons (trustees) that thinks it is a corporate board has gone insane. In any of these distortions, there is a translation of the relationship between persons to that of relation between things (programs, money, positions, offices). More importantly, the pastor forgets that her position is a structural effect of a network of relationships and begins to think that it is her immediate property, a “natural essence” she carries “in herself ” independent of a certain type of network of social relationships between her and her congregation (and God). The relationship of domination, the domineering priestly behavior of pastors that Peter Paris told us often characterized traditional African American churches, is relocated to the CEO-pastor paradigm, similar to the transformation of the master–servant relationships as feudalism transitioned to capitalism. In his study of commodity fetishism, Marx noted that the relationship (of domination and servitude) between people became disguised as social relations between things, commodities, as European social formation moved from feudalism to capitalism.21 Before the emergence of capitalism and widespread commodification, the relationship of domination and servitude was direct, between persons (master–servant) in feudalism. But with the rise of commodities, domination between persons became disguised as relations between commodities, things. My point is that a somewhat similar transformation is taking place in the transition of the traditional pastoral model to the CEO-pastor paradigm. The CEO-pastor is the ordinary pastor who has festishized his or her position in precisely Marx’s term. The sad thing is that there are still traces of direct domination going on in most of these new corporate churches. There is another difference between the ordinary pastor and the CEO-pastor. They both appear to aim at the same goal but approach it differently. I will resort to the distinction Marx made between a capitalist and a miser, following his rhetorical flourish.22 The restless never-ending process of providing financial security alone is what the ordinary pastor aims at. This ceaseless striving to keep inflows ahead of outflows, this passionate chase after surplus (“black ink”), is common to pastors and the CEO-pastor; but while the CEO-pastor is merely a pastor gone mad, the ordinary pastor is a normatively ethos-guided CEO-pastor. The never-ending augmentation of surplus that the CEO-pastor strives after by dissolving all solid spiritual matters (or social relationships among people) into thin air, is attained by the more ethos-respecting pastor by constantly plowing the surplus afresh into direct service and care of members of the congregation. The CEO-pastor translates every practice or encounter into results. The ordinary pastor translates every practice or result into process and ignores the result because both the people and the institution are focused on the to-come. Anyone who has observed the rising influence or prevalence of CEO-pastors might have noticed that the madness we have described above is more common with certain Pentecostal-type churches or personality-driven independent churches. The commonplace answer is to say that these types of churches do not have a strong

344

Handbook of African American Theology

(independent) board of trustees. The point is well taken, but it is not the whole story or the most engaging angle of analysis. The adoption of the CEO-pastor form of ministerial leadership is a solution to the contingency of power. It is a price paid by the leader for acting like he or she embodies the power of the Holy Spirit. Such pastors want to overcome the contingency of “anointing” that there is nothing of themselves that prompted God to give them more grace to build bigger churches or congregation; they did not make themselves what they are. By acting or portraying themselves as CEO-pastors with certain properties and qualifications they attempt to posit a certain necessity to their rise to the top. One of the functions of their bravado or style is to show that there is a deep knowledge, wisdom, or essence operating behind the scenes that necessitates their ascendancy to the top. They want to retroactively posit the reasons or presuppositions for their emergence as leaders. In a way, does the difference between the CEO-pastor and the traditional pastor not remind us of the difference between the genius and the apostle as discussed by Kierkegaard?23 The foregoing analysis has been begging a question and one can no longer resist responding to it. Is there a moment of Fall from the traditional pastoral model to the CEO-pastor paradigm, a point in history when the original model was corrupted and set on a course of degeneration? We must proceed carefully here and not give priority to a period of Innocence, pre-fall dimension. We need a shift of perspective; we need to adopt a parallax view. Technically, there was never a period of innocence that preceded the fall. The so-called innocence was already shot through with the CEO-impulse. So we have to think of the absolute identity of the innocence and the fall—and possibly the Redemption. Innocence is not prior to the fall. The fall created the dimension of innocence from which it is a fall. The fall is identical to innocence. Innocence is “in itself ” already fall (redemption). After all, what is the fall? It is the breaking of the CEO-impulse from its confines. It is the very event of the fall that created the dimension from which it fell and now shows us what is “lost” in the traditional pastoral model. Redemption is not a recovery of what was “lost,” but the passage from the “lost” to a properly pastoral model.24 Let me end this section by once again drawing our attention to my basic argument about the difference between the pastoral model and the CEO-pastor paradigm.25 It is true that the CEO-pastor is the ordinary pastor who has taken too far the CEO-impulse in the pastoral model. It is more true to say that there is a deep similarity between the CEO-pastor and the pastoral model: they both have the seed of CEO-impulse in them. The difference, the gap between the two modes of ministerial leadership, is not an external obstacle; it is within. The pastoral model is internally split; it carries within itself the CEOpastor paradigm. It encompasses both itself and the CEO-pastor paradigm. The pastoral model not only generates or mediates the CEO-pastor paradigm but also the difference between the pastoral model and the CEO-pastor paradigm is internal to the CEO-pastor paradigm. The pastoral model has to appear within the CEO-pastor paradigm or structure as the hint or pointer that the CEO-pastor paradigm is not all there is to ministerial leadership. In so far as the opposition between the pastoral model and the CEO-pastor paradigm appears as the opposition between the biblical (historical) content of meaning of ministry and its expression in a contingent (capitalist) particular form of ministry, then the pastoral model (or the CEO-pastor paradigm) shows itself as a

Black Church Pastors as CEOs

345

dialectical unity of opposites. There is no such thing as a pristine or superior mode of pastoral institutional management that will eliminate the hints and possibilities of the CEO model or the traditional pastoral model. Theology’s role is to show how ministry, in spite of this tension, can increase the love of God and the love of neighbor.

From CEO-pastor to non-CEO-pastor What is the way out of the quagmire of the CEO-pastor paradigm? There is really no good way out of it. The “evil” of the CEO-pastor paradigm (if you chose to designate it as such) is not some Augustinian evil that has no positive substance of its own, only parasitic on the good. This “evil” is not the absence of the good. Evil here is a monstrous mode of appearance of the good (or truth). The truth of the good hurts and enacts its effects through its failure in so far as it autonomizes itself from or functions as a small object of desire (objet petit a) in the very core of the pastoral identity (model). Let me put it in a different way. Evil here is proximity to the good. Evil here is the good when the pastor comes too close to it—without the necessary mediation. Once again, how do we keep a proper distance from the CEO-pastor paradigm? The solution is not the eradication of the CEO-pastor paradigm because the CEO model is an inherent obstacle within the pastoral model. We only have to traverse the internal gap that splits the pastoral model. This means experiencing the negation of negation, negating the CEO-pastor that is a negation of the pastoral model. But the negation of negation will not return us to an initial positive determination of the pastoral model, not to where we started. The negation of negation only leads to an assertion of a non-predicate. The path is to go from traditional pastor to CEO-pastor, and then to non-CEOpastor. The double negation does not bring us to the traditional pastor, as it is not about negating a predicate but asserting a non-predicate. This non-CEO-pastor class of pastors are far less than CEO-pastors on the scale of organs without body (OwB), but are not exactly ordinary pastors (at the level of their pre-encounter with the corporatizing bug or capitalist-omnipresent-ing trend). They are neither traditional pastors nor CEOpastors, but they are marked by a fervent commitment to sound economic management principles, which although negating what we understand as the “pastoral model,” is inherent to being a pastor. The non-CEO-pastor fully embraces the CEO model (resourcefulness). This requires a subjective recognition or engagement with the pastoral calling. The non-CEO-pastors are alive to good economic management practices, while “dead” to the rent-seeking or profit-maximizing attitude of CEO-pastors because of a radical subjective engagement with their calling. This is not another quality or property we attach exclusively to black church pastors. It is a “ ‘performative’ self-recognition grounded only in its own naming; in other words, it is a purely subjective feature.”26 Like the apostle in Kierkegaard’s short text, “On the Difference between Genius and Apostle,” the pastor just wants to bear witness to the impersonal truth of the pastoral model that transcends him. He is unlike the genius (CEO-pastor in our discussion) in so far as he thinks of himself as chosen by grace alone and as possessing no special inner features that qualify him for this role. He is not struggling to express “that which is in him more than himself.” He is a defeat to the struggle of the CEO-pastor.

346

Handbook of African American Theology

This very understanding of the calling, that which the subjectivized pastor “embodies” actualizes itself only in the person of the non-CEO-pastor as subject of God. Your pastor looks (to paraphrase Marx) like a non-CEO-pastor and acts like a non-CEOpastor, but this should not deceive you—he is a non-CEO-pastor. You will encounter the same person before the subjectivation as after it. Does this lack of difference not mirror the “pure” difference that separates the pastoral model from itself? This state of subjectivized existence is not a synthesis or reconciliation of opposites of pragmatic pastor and the theological ideals of the pastoral model with its inherent gap and tensions. What has happened here is that the gap that separates the pastor and the actualization of the ideals of his or her office is posited as inherent to the pastor. The pastor is never fully him- or herself because there is something pastoral (of non-CEO-pastor) in him, the inhuman excess in every man or woman. The traditional pastor’s struggle against the external trend (enemy) of the CEO-pastor paradigm is the struggle against his own tendency, excess, disavowed underside. So the very feature that separates the pastor from the ideals of the pastoral model turns out to unite him with the pastoral model. The point is not to reduce the inherent gap of the pastoral model, which makes it inconsistent, “non-all,” to the gap within a human being (the inhuman excess) that separates a human being from him- or herself, but to say that we cannot grasp the essence of the pastoral model without the gap in human beings. The essence of the pastoral model is the modeling of the essence itself. From the foregoing discussions, it is clear that there are two modes of transforming the CEO-pastor paradigm within the horizon of the traditional pastor model of black churches. Either one opposes the CEO-pastor paradigm by supporting a negative version of it or one tries to regain the creative CEO-impulse that the CEO-pastor paradigm betrayed in the actualization of its potentiality. In the first mode, the congregation is unknowingly caught within the horizon of the CEO-pastor paradigm, fighting within its terrain and against the stakes defined by it. By repeating the CEOimpulse in the second mode we bring out the pure difference between the traditional pastoral model and the CEO-pastor paradigm. Finally, let me add that my approach to the subject matter has perhaps touched the heart of our theme today: “Black Church as Business: Rise of Corporate and Political Model.” The subjectivation of calling in response to the rise of the CEO-pastor in a certain sense brings together the corporate and political model in the black church without turning the same into a business. Subjectivation as fidelity to truth of calling (as per Alain Badiou) and the embrace of the CEO model are at once economic and political.

Conclusion: only God can save the black church I started with a joke and I would like to end with one. This time it is a twist of a story from the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Metzia 59b).27 Three black pastors were discussing the theme of CEO-pastors in African American churches with two economists. This was after a symposium on black churches at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2015. The economists ask them: “Will you adopt the CEO management model in your churches?” The black ministers answered, “No.” The economists brought forward all the

Black Church Pastors as CEOs

347

excellent arguments they could find from journals, books, history, and contemporary stories of successful large congregations, but the three black ministers did not accept any of them. The resourceful economists even dredged up theological arguments they had garnered from their friends at the seminary, though they despised theology as obscurantist and held that God is dead. The ministers responded: “No proof can be brought from academic theology,” they rejoined. No matter what they said, the economists were unable to persuade the ministers of the merits of applying sound economic principles to church management. Finally, one of the economists in desperation said, “Let God himself testify that the merits of the CEO-pastor paradigm are according to our judgment.” Sure enough, a divine voice cried out, “Why do you dispute with the economists, with whom the Bible always agrees?” One of the black ministers stood up and protested, “There are no accounting equations, discounted cash flow statements, profit and loss statements, formulas for return on investment, and input-output tables in the Bible.” God himself agreed and laughed with joy saying, “My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.” But why did God agree with the black pastors when we know from the phenomenal experiences of the black churches that resourcefulness or the CEO model is inherent in the identity of the pastoral model or identity? Do we have here a case of the incompatibility between knowing and existence? I believe some pastors hold on to their opposition against resourcefulness in so far as they do not know the history, logic, and dynamics of the pastoral model in the black churches; that the CEO model is an internal obstacle in the pastoral model. Could it be that the moment they know, register its existence, their opposition ceases to exist? Does this not remind you of the cartoon character, Tom the cat, who can walk off a precipice and keep on walking on thin air but collapses to the ground the moment he looks down and recognizes that the ground beneath his feet is no longer there? Your rebuttal: “Yes, but is the lack of knowledge of the true history and philosophy the obstacle here?” No, you are right. This is not a case of lack of knowledge, but the absence of a necessary parallax perspective. It is about not understanding that the structure of relationship between the traditional pastoral model and the CEO-pastor paradigm is that of the Möbius strip. The CEO-pastor is not the opposite of the traditional pastor, but its other face. They are two sides of the Möbius strip. The dark excess of the CEO-pastor is the necessary negative of the excessive ethos-sensitivity and care of the traditional pastor. The care that harnesses the resourcefulness or the CEO-impulse for community flourishing is necessarily accompanied by the human excess that can arbitrarily suspend the care. There is a tiny, imperceptible, impossible gap between the faces of the strip that accommodates the Holy Spirit (Katechon) engaged in fierce battle to keep the two sides from collapsing into one another.

Notes 1

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. His ideas triangulate the thoughts of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Any engagement with his scholarly work inevitably brings the reader

348

2

Handbook of African American Theology into the confluence of against-the-grain interpretations of the thoughts of these three intellectual giants. Let me clarify this point about asserting a predicate with this passage from Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 75: When Agamben defines “Christians” not directly as “non-Jews,” but as “nonnon-Jews,” this double negation does not bring us back to the starting positive determination; it should rather be read as an example of what Kant called “infinite judgment,” which, instead of negating a predicate, asserts a nonpredicate: instead of saying that Christians aren’t Jews, one should say that they are non-Jews, in the same sense that horror fiction talks about the “undead.” The undead are alive while dead, they are the living dead; in the same way, Christians are non-Jews while remaining Jews (at the level of their pre-evental, positive social determination)—they are Jews who, as Paul put it, “died for [in the eyes of] the [Jewish] law.

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

In the same sense of the “undead,” non-CEO-pastors while remaining alive, as CEO-pastors are dead to the excesses of the CEO-pastor paradigm. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 1008. This is actually Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea about the prohibition of incest. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 586–7. Peter Paris, The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 60; see also 96–8. Paris, Spirituality of African Peoples, 60. Nimi Wariboko, Economics in Spirit and Truth: Moral Philosophy of Finance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), xi–xii, 168–9. Nimi Wariboko, “Management in Postcolonial Africa: Historical and Comparative Perspectives” in Black Business and Economic Power, ed. Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 266–7. This is a parable of a master who gave investible funds to his three servants. Two of them invested the funds and had handsome returns. One hid his fund and did not invest because he thought the master is a cruel businessman who liked to reap where he did not sow. The master praised the first two and promoted them, and rebuked the third servant as very wicked. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 113. Ibid., 114. This is not say that there is a capitalist model at work in Jesus’s teaching. For a discussion of this kind of difference, see Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 768–71, 785. Ibid., 166. Ibid. Ibid., 548. See Nimi Wariboko, Accounting and Money for Ministerial Leadership: Key Practical and Theological Insights (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013). Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), 16. Information related by Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 139–40. Marx, Capital, 1:170.

Black Church Pastors as CEOs

349

22 See ibid., 1:254–5. 23 Søren Kierkegaard, “On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle,” in The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 87–108. 24 Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 129–30. 25 The CEO-pastor paradigm is called a paradigm to distinguish it from a model. It is a particular manifestation of the pastoral model or a “terrifying excess” which, although it negates the pastoral model, is inherent to leading pastorally or being pastoral. 26 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 75. 27 Ibid., 103.

Part Four

Dialogues

26

Black Theology and Black Humanism Duane T. Loynes, Sr.

Does a righteous God govern the universe?

– Frederick Douglass

Introduction In 1969, James H. Cone inaugurated the formal discipline of black theology with the publication of Black Theology and Black Power, an intellectual tour de force that initiated Cone’s brilliant five-decade publishing career. Black Theology and Black Power forthrightly and passionately articulated Cone’s conviction that God is on the side of the marginalized, best indicated in the US context by divine solidarity with the experiences of the black diaspora in America. This reflects the idea held by many in the black church that, in Scripture, there is an overarching (though not unproblematic) trajectory of liberatory events for the people of God. Black theology, thus, became the principal expression of a theology centered around the notion of “liberation as the heart of the Christian gospel and blackness as the primary mode of God’s presence.”1 In 1973, four years after the publication of Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, William R. Jones issued a response in his seminal work, Is God a White Racist? (hereafter IGWR).2 Although Jones’s work posed a provocative challenge to treatments of suffering by all North American theologians, his primary focus was on the theodical implications of black theology. Theodicy, as a field of inquiry in both theology and philosophy, finds its origin in the Greek words for God (theos) and justice (dikê). The term, coined by the brilliant German scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, refers to one way of addressing the apparent incompatibility of an omnibenevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and just God with the presence of evil and suffering in the world.3 Jones was concerned that black theologians, in their attempt to craft a theology that specifically brought black life and Christian theology into dialogue, had unwittingly and uncritically assumed a particular conception of God that did not center on black suffering. As a result, these theologians were embracing a methodology that, far from undoing theological racism, was only a “teasing mirage that gives the appearance of dismantling old master–servant theologies while actually preserving and perpetuating them in a new and disguised form.”4

354

Handbook of African American Theology

Jones’s work is important in that it represents the first significant engagement between black humanism—a trajectory of black experience that embraces the positive potential of humanity along with a minimization (or outright rejection) of the need for divine aid—and black theology. This essay will summarize Jones’s IGWR and the more recent body of work by Anthony B. Pinn, as well as briefly discuss the concept of redemptive suffering that serves as the primary target for humanist critiques of black theology.

William R. Jones and IGWR Jones begins the 1998 edition of IGWR by discussing his initial participation in a fundamentalist form of Christianity that he terms Whiteanity, his “shorthand for the religious ideology of white supremacy.”5 Considering this form of Christianity to be representative of Christianity as a whole, his inclination toward justice and liberation created an existential crisis: does the eradication of oppression necessitate the rejection of Christianity? Agonizing between the Scylla of Whiteanity and the Charybdis of an atheistic humanism, Jones eventually realized his error in assuming that “to get rid of oppression you had to put religion out of business.”6 At the heart of Jones’s provocative project is the notion of divine racism, the possibility that God is not for the liberation of all humans, but may in fact be diametrically opposed to the flourishing of some (i.e., “God’s delay or inaction works in the interests of whites, not blacks”).7 Divine racism, thus, is the conjunction of ethnic suffering and a particular conception of God’s sovereignty. Jones summarizes the concept of divine racism in five points. First, traditional theism seems to appeal to a “two-category system”8 ordained by God comprised of an “in” group (i.e., those favored by God) and an “out” group (i.e., those to whom God is indifferent or hostile). Second, the “out” group receives an imbalance of suffering. Third, God is ultimately responsible for the inordinate suffering of the “out” group, even if humans or angelic beings are the “actual instrument and executioners of the divine plan.”9 Fourth, God’s favor or disfavor toward particular groups falls along ethnic/racial lines. And lastly, God is a member of (or, at least, identifies with) the “in” group. Thus, for Jones’s purposes, divine racism implies a white God. Here, he cites Reverend Buckner Payne: Now as Adam was white, Abraham white and our Savior white, did he enter heaven when he arose from the dead as a white man or as a negro? If as a white man, then the negro is left out; if as a negro then the white man is left out. As Adam was the Son of God and as God is light (white) and in Him is no darkness (black) at all, how could God then be the father of the negro, as like begets like? And if God could not be the father of the blacks because He was white, how could our Savior, “being the express image of God’s person,” as asserted by St. Paul, carry such a damned color into heaven, where all are white, much less to the throne?10

Jones’s aversion to applying Westernized, austere preconceptions of goodness to God is rooted in his agreement with Jean-Paul Sartre that humans err when they evade

Black Theology and Black Humanism

355

responsibility for their actions, choosing to take comfort in “dreams, expectations and hopes” that only serve as “deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled.”11 Against those who narcotize themselves with false ideas in order to “sustain them in their misery,”12 Sartre argues, “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”13 Jones takes this idea and applies it to God: God’s character and motives are a function of His past and present performance in human history. Jones writes: This principle obviously presents apparently insurmountable difficulties for the black theologian, for it forces him to identify the actual events in which he sees the benevolent and liberating hand of God at work not for man in general, but for blacks. This is not easily accomplished in light of the long history of oppression that is presupposed by each black theologian.14

Jones expresses dissatisfaction with the eschatological route that many black theologians take in evading the consequences of this challenge. Christian hope, they say, grounds an expectation that there will be a “corrective development in the course of human history,”15 whether it is the fulfillment of something only experienced in germinal form now, or a “radical and qualitative break with present conditions.”16 Jones finds the logic of this maneuver puzzling: God can be expected to act justly and liberate blacks from an unjust future because of our trust that he is omnibenevolent. However, in making this move, black theologians are assuming the very thing that is in question, namely, the goodness of God. Jones does not contest that God may, in a final evaluation, turn out to be good—if that goodness is rooted in God’s character and activity. Furthermore, suffering as an indicator of God’s divine disfavor can be dismissed as an option only if there is a clear transformation in the status of the one who has endured suffering. Thus, the only way to escape the charge of divine racism is the presence of a liberating event (i.e., the conclusion of suffering that ends in blessing) in addition to the humiliation event (i.e., suffering itself). The final component of Jones’s notion of divine racism is the reality of a race-specific form of adversity that he terms ethnic suffering. The suffering that has characterized the lives of the non-white population in the United States possesses four features that lend credence to the charge of divine racism: its maldistribution, its negative quality, its enormity, and its non-catastrophic character.17 By maldistribution, Jones references the fact that suffering does not appear to be a random phenomenon among humanity, but seems to be concentrated in the experiences of particular racial/ethnic groups, a fact balanced by “white non-suffering.”18 He cites John Bowker, who writes: “The problem in Scripture is not why suffering exists, but why it afflicts some people and not others. The problem is not the fact of suffering, but its distribution.”19 The negative quality of ethnic suffering “describes a suffering without essential value for man’s salvation or well-being. It leads away from, rather than toward, one’s highest good.”20 Enormity is an umbrella category referring to the statistical reality of suffering, the disproportionate scope of suffering, and the extremity of suffering that renders any eschatological/ pedagogical theodicy ridiculous (i.e., how can suffering be beneficial if the very act of

356

Handbook of African American Theology

suffering destroys the victim?). Finally, the non-catastrophic nature of ethnic suffering indicates its transgenerational character—the suffering is of a sort that is passed down and foisted upon successive generations. The specificity of black suffering does not seem to indicate a divine being that is indifferent to matters of race or ethnicity. In reflecting upon these characteristics in light of black suffering, Jones notes: It is my contention that the peculiarities of black suffering make the question of divine racism imperative; it is not my position that the special character of black suffering answers the question. What I do affirm is that black theology, precisely because of the prominence of ethnic suffering in the black experience, cannot operate as if the goodness of God for all mankind were a theological axiom.21

Jones rejects a trajectory characterizing the response that the black church has often posited in response to its unique suffering. Drawing upon Benjamin Mays’s The Negro’s God, where Mays argues that blacks resist oppression in accordance with their conception of theism such that their “social philosophy and [their] idea of God go hand in hand,”22 Jones laments the “compensatory beliefs” (a category deployed by Mays) that have taken hold of the black consciousness with regard to adversity. Compensatory beliefs are theological beliefs held by blacks that enable them to endure oppression without necessarily motivating them to eliminate the source of their suffering.23 Examples of this tendency toward escapism and pacifism abound in Christian sermons and hymnody: “The harder the Cross, the brighter the crown,” “This World is Not My Home,” “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” (with the phrase “And the things of earth will grow strangely dim”), “I’ll Fly Away,”“Take the World, But Give Me Jesus,” and “(I’d rather have Jesus than) Silver and Gold,” to name a few.24 Drawing upon Albert Camus’s The Plague and The Rebel, Jones confronts this approach to theodicy that serves as a prop for oppression. For Jones, if a theodicy only serves to exonerate God’s “purpose and governance in the face of some questionable and embarrassing features of the human condition,”25 then it will lead to the cardinal sin of quietism. Quietism is a way of dealing with suffering that allows it to continue unabated, a “posture of conformity,” a refusal to undertake “corrective action,” especially versus “cultural practices and institutional structures.”26 Quietism is the logical outcome of particular presuppositions concerning God and evil (e.g., the status quo is the ideal, corrective action is improper, God alone is responsible for the ending of suffering). Jones’s appeal to Camus largely serves to critique quietist tendencies within human responses to suffering. However, ethnic suffering inevitably opens the door to the question of whether God is quietist. For Jones, there are only two possible options for black theology: secular humanism or a “humanocentric theism.”27 Jones identifies himself as a secular humanist but doesn’t advocate for this particular position in IGWR since it would require a significant argument that theism itself is a hindrance to liberation. Furthermore, most black theologians would probably want to embrace a “theistic framework for theodicy.”28 Nevertheless, Jones does identify one advantage to delaying a full defense of secular humanism: I wish to identify which theistic options provide a viable framework for a theology of liberation. Humanocentric theism is such an option, and it is also the last point

Black Theology and Black Humanism

357

on the theistic spectrum before one jumps to the position of humanism. If I can demonstrate the value of humanocentric theism for a black theodicy, I have also succeeded at the same time in providing an entree for its immediate neighbor, secular humanism, into the theological arena. In this way, the discussion of humanocentric theism helps to pave the way for secular humanism as an appropriate complement for contemporary black religion.29

Jones finds that humanocentric theism still retains the relevant principle of humanism necessary for his project: the “functional ultimacy of man.”30 Here, Sartre’s influence is clearly felt, reflecting Sartre’s concern in “Existentialism is a Humanism” that humanity is the ultimate valuator.31 In an extended endnote, Jones articulates this critical concept: This principle is another way of stating Protagoras’ dictum, “Man is the measure of all things.” I interpret this to mean that man can only act as if he were the ultimate in the realm of values or history or both. It may well be the case that, ontologically speaking, he is not ultimate, but nonetheless it is necessary for him to choose, to valuate, regardless of the character of the rest of reality. This situation of man does not change, whether God exists or not. My own approach universalizes this principle and interprets it as the consequence of man’s freedom.32

Building upon the preceding chapters of IGWR, Jones articulates a set of conditions that are necessary for a “viable black theodicy.”33 For Jones, the essential feature of humanocentric theism as a framework for black projects in theodicy is the “exalted status it assigns to man and his activity.”34 At issue are competing relations between divine and human freedom, with the opposite of humanocentric theism being a “theocentric theism,” one in which God’s sovereignty is emphasized over humanity’s freedom.35 Jones sees humanocentric theism as being completely consistent with the biblical depiction of humanity as partner with God. In the same manner that God, in the Incarnation, joined with humanity to accomplish his purposes on earth, so humanity honors God when it takes its responsibility as free agents seriously. Furthermore, Jones sees benefits that a humanocentric theism provides for constructing a black theodicy. First, it accommodates human freedom in a consistent manner because it dispenses with a notion of God’s hyper-sovereignty that obliterates any true notion of human agency. Second, it handles the charge of divine racism by “removing God’s overruling sovereignty from human history.”36 Racism, for example, is clearly a function of human failure, not divine. Jones states: There is a decided plus for making racism the consequence of human activities alone. Any analysis of racism that fails to recognize it as the consequence of a gross imbalance of power is unacceptable. Racism, like all oppression, is an exercise in power in which one group can pursue its priorities unchecked by a coequal force.37

Third, a humanocentric theism also prohibits religious escape routes put forward by whites as justification for racism. Whether it’s Christianity or the Bible or God’s will— none of them can any longer be considered the basis for the preservation of systems of

358

Handbook of African American Theology

oppression. Jones notes that this also liberates those who are oppressed; they, too, are no longer victims to the belief that their condition is condoned by God, and they are freed to take their flourishing into their own hands. God is no longer on anyone’s side.38 Finally, Jones considers humanocentric theism to be a resource for black theologies as they confront the “emergent secularism of our time.”39

Anthony B. Pinn and twenty-first-century black humanism Anthony B. Pinn is the obvious heir apparent to Jones’s humanism. Pinn earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University (where he also earned MDiv and MA degrees). A prolific writer, Pinn’s first work, Why, Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (a revision of his doctoral dissertation), traced the history of the themes of suffering and religion in black thought from the spirituals of slaves in the New World to the relatively recent strand of humanism found at the end of the twentieth century.40 Pinn, who spent much of his childhood and young adulthood as an active member of his African Methodist Episcopal church, notes the dissonance he began to acknowledge when he reflected upon the “existential hardship faced by African-Americans”41 in light of the Christian doctrines he was teaching. Concerned to pursue true liberation and the flourishing of his community at all costs, Pinn embraced black humanism, a “longstanding modality of orientation within African-American communities”42 that “denies the existence of God and holds humans fully accountable for the existence and removal of moral evil in the world.”43 Pinn distinguishes between two forms of humanism: weak and strong. Weak humanism is a creative tension between an affirmation of human potential/ responsibility and some form of divine activity/responsibility in the world; a “blending of transcendence and immanence.”44 Pinn writes: By this terminology, weak humanism, I mean to conceptualize the assumed workings of God through human muscle and mission found within the arena of human life, whereby flesh becomes a particular encasing for God.45

As such, weak humanism (the classification that Pinn affixes to Jones’s humanocentric theism) is consistent with the black church tradition and advocates that, although God’s nature and sovereignty should be challenged, humans work in conjunction with God to achieve human liberation as opposed to relying wholly upon God.46 Strong humanism, by contrast, places the eradication of black suffering above theological concerns, even to the point of completely rejecting God. Pinn contends that humanism, even the strong variety, is a form of religion and should therefore be included in discussions concerning the black religious tradition. There is a strong resonance between black humanism and liberal theology. For example, black and womanist theologies, in reflecting upon existential questions, have articulated new theologies that challenge traditional theism. The purview of their considerations is largely limited to the symbolic use of the God concept, resulting in challenges to the ways in which the concept of God was/is deployed to support the

Black Theology and Black Humanism

359

status quo of racism, classism, sexism, etc. In doing so, black and womanist theologians appeal to the Christian Scriptures and black culture to support their primary affirmation of God-as-liberator.47 As such, black humanism “draws from the best of the liberal theology tradition and the existential edge (and social critique) of black religious thought, and it distills them through a rejection, among other things, of transcendence and the divine.”48 Notwithstanding this powerful resonance, black humanism breaks from liberal theology in that: it is not premised on God as anything more than a matter of language, a human construct, and it gives little attention to the importance (symbolic or real) of the Christ Event as a cipher for human self-understanding.49

For Pinn, because the symbol of God has no referent, it is “inadequate in light of African American history and current needs.”50 Religion, therefore, is conceived as a “search for ultimate meaning also called complex subjectivity”51 that eschews transcendental claims (i.e., appeals to realities beyond our material world) and is rooted within the fabric of “African American historical realities and cultural creations.”52 The turn toward the subjective avoids a solipsistic pitfall due to Pinn’s emphasis on the role of community in serving as the matrix for this conception of religion. Using Charles Long’s conception of religion in his groundbreaking text, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, Pinn embraces a capacious rendering of the “religious” as anything that can provide an overarching framework for reality and a center for basing morality. Pinn states: That is, strong humanism is a religious system because it provides a framework that guides human conduct and connects this conduct to the larger reality of Black community. Strong humanism fulfills a fundamental requirement of any religious system in that it defines, explains, and provides functional guidelines for reality. In this way, strong humanism, like other religious systems, keeps humanity from collapsing into a state of chaos. By providing a functional worldview, explaining “reality,” and clarifying proper human conduct, strong humanism meets the basic definition of a religion.53

Pinn adds: Simply put, my thesis is this: humanism entails a form of African American religious experience that is vital but not adequately articulated through traditional Black theology. Hence, I suggest a Theology of Immanence that articulates a nonGod based religious experience, drawn from the African American experience and committed to liberation through an ethic marked by continual struggle for full humanity.54

Whereas early writings on black religious humanism “centered on [a] critique of and challenge to [the] doctrine of God (and the characteristics and intent of the

360

Handbook of African American Theology

divine),”55 Pinn is leading the charge down a more constructive path. Pinn’s 2012 work, The End of God-Talk: An African American Humanist Theology, is the “first presentation of an African American humanist theology,” one constructed according to nontraditional discursive categories.56 Recent works by Pinn have expanded black humanism into the interpretation of areas such as pop culture, technology, and race relations.57

Suffering and black religious thought The arguments made by Jones, Pinn, and others provide a necessary corrective to traditional Christian doctrines, particularly for black theology, but also for the Christian community in general. Suffering, although not the only characteristic of the black experience in the United States, is none the less an important reality that informs all facets of black reflection, especially with regard to religion. Jones’s contention that the theodical question is already at the center of black religious thought seems warranted, since it interfaces (with difficulty) with notions of God’s sovereignty and benevolence. Pinn extends Jones’s work and contends that true concern for black flourishing necessitates a departure from traditional black theodicies since, mired as they are in the language of redemptive suffering, they “counteract efforts at liberation by finding something of value in Black suffering.”58 For Pinn, there is no space for any notion of redemptive suffering because there is no Redeemer to appeal to. Phrased differently, Pinn is challenging the axiomatic assertion of God’s liberatory intentions rooted in appeals to Scripture. Pinn states: Such an assertion of God’s intent requires, however, signs that God is actually involved in a process of progressive struggle, and these signs must be drawn from the ongoing history of the oppressed group.59

At issue is the idea of redemptive suffering in black religious thought, especially the general tendency in some theological constructions to treat the experience of moral evil as “redemptive” in some fashion, forming us to be better Christians or allowing us to participate in the eschatological drama of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant.60 Pinn makes a similar critique of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s theodicy. Pinn says, Into the late twentieth century the most widely recognized articulations of redemptive suffering theodicy tied to the notion of the “suffering servant” is [sic] found in the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. In numerous texts he argues that the acceptance of unmerited suffering by African-Americans has redemptive consequences tied to the formulation of the Beloved Community (or kingdom of God).61

Pinn takes issue with King’s approach because it appears to valorize some or all forms of evil, failing to account for the way that evil deforms humanity, pushing victims and abusers alike away from God and distorting genuine experiences of community. What is missing from theodicies of this sort is a concomitant liberative component,

Black Theology and Black Humanism

361

one that recognizes that, although suffering may retrospectively produce some positive fruit, evil is still to be resisted conceptually and practically. Black humanism, in its dialogue with black theology, forces the latter toward a conceptual clarity regarding suffering. What must be affirmed, without equivocation, is the notion that evil itself is always deformative and never redemptive. However, what black theology asserts (however imprecisely) is that an intervention of some sort can redeem the victim’s processing or response to evil and bring some good out of it. So, considering that suffering is both our direct experience of evil and our (conceptually if not temporally) subsequent interpretation of the experience of evil, to say that suffering is redemptive is to assert the possibility that we can experience/process an occasion of evil in such a way that its deforming path is mitigated in some manner. In Reclaiming Theodicy: Reflections on Suffering, Compassion and Spiritual Transformation, Michael Stoeber considers his initial reaction to a friend’s disclosure that she had been brutally attacked as a young girl by a trusted acquaintance: Since she knew I had written a book on God and the problem of evil, my friend expected helpful answers. Putting on my professor’s hat, I moved into my head, and began to respond in abstract terms of spiritual transformation, how we can learn by and through our suffering, how suffering can be conducive to emotional and spiritual growth. But the shock from my intimate psychic connection to my friend’s childhood horror quickly brought me back into my body. I began to stumble and stutter, realizing as I was speaking that I was dangerously close to denying the evil that was done to her as a child, suggesting that it might be somehow good for her, that she would become “better” through its overcoming, that perhaps, for example, she would now be able to help heal people who had undergone similar horrors.62

Stoeber, subsequently, would develop a distinction between transformative suffering (the possibility for spiritual growth that some victims and empathetic observers can attain through suffering) and destructive suffering (suffering that is wholly negative with no redeeming value), emphasizing the Christian notion of the afterlife as a possible state where “healing and continued spiritual growth”63 can occur. The problem that Stoeber acknowledges is made possible by the fact that treatments of theodicy within North American religion are most often done in the abstract, with hypothetical considerations of tsunamis, famines, and other horrors, sprinkled with the occasional reference to actual evils (9/11 being the illustration of choice since 2001). However, rarely do authors engage the most prolific example of suffering in North America: the brutal treatment of people of color. Jones argues: The classical theodicies are deficient because they primarily treat the issue of human suffering in general; the issue of ethnic suffering is not investigated. When a theodicy is transferred from the arena of general human suffering to ethnic suffering, its utility vanishes.64

James B. Haile III adds:

362

Handbook of African American Theology

The problem inherent with white theology and the white church—a problem to which black liberation theology indirectly responds—is its failure to engage the troubles of human existence—oppression, disappointment, fear, uncertainty, doubt—concretely and critically; rather, the white church favors a more abstract, intellectual, one might say, philosophically formalistic manner in their understanding of human existence and the nature of God. In the white church the Jesus of scripture becomes a transcendental figure more than a transcendent figure, a canonical archetype, but certainly not a figure of terrestrial importance.65

Cone writes: White theologians and philosophers write numerous articles and books on theodicy, asking why God permits massive suffering, but they hardly ever mention the horrendous crimes Whites have committed against people of color in the modern world.66

Cone goes on to list four reasons why white theologians don’t talk about racism, reasons that similarly apply to the absence of racism in discussions on theodicy. Whites don’t have to because of the inequity of power relations in the US, discussions on racism arouse white guilt, a desire to avoid black rage, and a reluctance to pursue a “radical redistribution of wealth and power.”67 One example of this unconscionable omission is John S. Feinberg’s The Many Faces of Evil: Theological Systems and the Problems of Evil.68 This comprehensive project evaluates several theological and philosophical approaches to the problem of evil. Feinberg, in more than 500 pages, considers theonomy, Leibniz, David Hume, atheism, arguments for and against God’s existence, hell, and a multiplicity of forms of evil and the problems that each form presents to traditional theism. And yet, Feinberg fails to mention slavery, racism, genocide, African Americans, Native Americans, liberation theology, Cone, King, the Civil Rights Movement, or the American church’s tragic history of injustice. Feinberg is not alone in this regard—the same could be said regarding other popular works that articulate responses at the nexus of faith and suffering (e.g., N.T. Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God, where Wright provides passing references to the horror of Hurricane Katrina as an inspiration for his text, but doesn’t acknowledge the fact that black bodies were the ones who suffered the most).69 What accounts for this indifference, this incapacity to acknowledge the most egregious accounts of suffering that present themselves not as distant artifacts of history but as immanent realities that still afflict our national conscience? Bryan Massingale, in recounting a similar trajectory within Catholic ethical thought, discusses the “systemic erasure” of blackness as a legitimate site for theological reflection.70 Lamenting the “racially selective sympathy and indifference”71 that has characterized Catholic theological ethics with regard to US racism, Massingale critiques a refusal to acknowledge the unjust impoverishment of some as well as the unjust enrichment of others. He writes: Marking white theologians as “white” means naming and facing the deforming effects of culture on the consciousness of North American and European

Black Theology and Black Humanism

363

theological ethicists. It means facing not only the possibility but indeed the probability that Catholic ethicists of the past (and too often in the present), being (de)formed by the systemic distortion of Western racism, did not and could not have regarded persons of African descent as numbered among the “subjects” to whom they should “turn.”72

Massingale notes that this erasure results in not only the silencing of important voices, but also a “deformed ethical reflection,” one that does not benefit from the resources (and challenges) that considerations of black suffering would bring to ethical and theodical reflection. He adds: Because of this silencing and invisibility, there are not only voices that have not been heard, there are moral questions that have not been asked by Catholic theological ethicists of previous generations, such as the following: “What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus in a racist society?”; “In a world where ‘black’ is an illegitimate or inferior mode of being human, what are the social implications of believing that Black Americans are made in the image of God?”; “How are persons of African descent to live ethically in a society that denies, questions, or attacks our humanity?”; “How do we tell those whom society ignores, fears, and disdains that they are sons and daughters of God?” Not averting to such questions in a society of endemic racism makes one’s ethical project not only inadequate and incomplete, it also strains credibility.73

Massingale is considering not only the ethical failure of such an approach, but also the counterproductive nature of it. In addition to ignoring historic injustices, one should ask: why would scholars fail to avail themselves of the vast theodicean resources that can be mined by evaluating the ways blacks have harmonized their own tragic social intercourse with the church, even to the point of largely identifying themselves with Christianity?74

Future dialogue between black theology and black humanism A serious engagement with suffering can provide a starting point for future discussions between black theologians, black humanists, and other scholars of religion—despite diverging ontologies regarding God’s existence. Ultimately, black religious experience, arising from the deep pain of individuals trying to make sense of their struggles, contains theodical insights that push us to transcend mere intellectual reflection and fashion a world better equipped to eradicate injustice.

Notes 1

James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), vii. Emphasis in original.

364 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

Handbook of African American Theology William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. A second edition (with a new preface and afterword) was published in 1998 by Beacon Press. References to this text will focus on the revised 1998 edition. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (Open Court, 1998). Jones, Is God a White Racist?, ix–x. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 215 n. 1. Ibid., ix. Frederick L. Ware, African American Theology: An Introduction (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 99. Jones, Is God a White Racist?, 3. Ibid., 4. Quoted in ibid., 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre: Existentialism by Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Others, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Plume, 1975), 359. Ibid., 358. Ibid. Jones, Is God a White Racist?, 11. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 20–3. Ibid., 21. John Bowker, Problems of Suffering in Religions of the World (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 5, quoted in Jones, Is God a White Racist?, 21. Emphasis in original. Jones, Is God a White Racist?, 21. Ibid., 22. Emphasis in original. Benjamin Mays, The Negro’s God (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 155. This is akin to the central argument in Pinn’s Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (to be discussed later). James H. Cone, in The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Orbis, 1991), contends that some of the allegedly other-worldly or heaven-oriented elements found in songs (in his case, Negro spirituals) are misunderstood. He writes: “Most observers have defined the black religious experience exclusively in terms of slaves longing for heaven, as if that desire was unrelated to their earthly liberation” (78). Heaven, for slaves, did not always refer to “a transcendent reality beyond time and space,” rather, it often “designated the earthly places that blacks regarded as lands of freedom” (79). Thus, Heaven or Canaan or the Promised Land served as proxies for the northern US or Canada (Cone, 79). Even beyond this, Cone sees the language of escape as an act of agency by slaves, determined to enact liberation in whatever manner they could, even if limited to a desire for ultimate respite in Heaven. However, with regard to the points made by Jones and Mays, the issue is not the genealogy of escapist language in songs, but the sad reality that, all too often, the people who sing them today engage in a performative act whereby they emphasize an otherworldly salvation in heaven over existential flourishing in the here and now. Jones, Is God a White Racist?, 43. Ibid., 44.

Black Theology and Black Humanism 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57

365

Ibid., 172. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” 369. Jones, Is God a White Racist?, 243 n. 2. This principle, Jones’s description of it, and Jones’s subsequent articulation of humanocentric theism, unfortunately, traffic in gender-insensitive language. Ibid., 173–75. Ibid., 187. Ibid. Ibid., 195. Ibid. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 197. Anthony B. Pinn, Why, Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995). Pinn, Why, Lord?, 10. Anthony B. Pinn, The End of God-Talk: An African American Humanist Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 139. Pinn, Why, Lord?, 11. Also see Pinn’s autobiographical account of his journey to humanistic atheism in Writing God’s Obituary: How a Good Methodist Became a Better Atheist (Prometheus Books, 2014). In African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Pinn notes that the denial of the God-concept is not a necessary component of humanism, but one that is important for him (8). Humanism, as he constructs it, is more about what it affirms than what it negates. Pinn, End of God-Talk, 142. Ibid., 140. Emphasis in original. Pinn, Why, Lord?, 18. Anthony B. Pinn, African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 103–4. Pinn, End of God-Talk, 139. Ibid., 139. Pinn, African American Humanist Principles, 104. Ibid. Ibid. Pinn, Why, Lord?, 19. Michael Lackey, in African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Sociocultural Dynamics of Faith (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007), argues against the classification of humanism as a religion, though his concern is primarily with the claim that people of African descent are naturally religious. See pages 142–50. Pinn, African American Humanist Principles, 103. Anthony B. Pinn, “Humanism in African American Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, eds. Katie G. Cannon and Anthony B. Pinn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 287. Ibid. See Humanism: Essays on Race, Religion and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), Humanism and Technology: Opportunities and Challenges (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016),

366

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Handbook of African American Theology and When Colorblindness Isn’t the Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race (Pitchstone, 2017). Pinn, Why, Lord?, 17. Anthony B. Pinn, ed., Moral Evil and Redemptive Suffering: A History of Theodicy in African-American Thought (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002), 14. This mirrors Jones’s demand for a “liberation-event” from black theologians. Isa. 52:13-53:12. Pinn, Moral Evil and Redemptive Suffering, 12. Michael Stoeber, Reclaiming Theodicy: Reflections on Suffering, Compassion and Spiritual Transformation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3. Ibid., 12. Jones, Is God a White Racist?, 197–8. James B. Haile III, “Dr. King as Liberation Theologian and Existential Philosopher,” in The Liberatory Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Critical Essays on the Philosopher King, ed. Robert E. Birt (New York: Lexington Books, 2012), 78. James H. Cone, “Theology’s Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy,” Black Theology: An International Journal 2, no. 2 (2004): 142. Ibid., 149. See John S. Feinberg’s The Many Faces of Evil: Theological Systems and the Problems of Evil (Crossway, 2004). See N.T. Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God (InterVarsity, 2006). Bryan Massingale, “The Systemic Erasure of the Black/Dark-Skinned Body in Catholic Ethics,” in Catholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future: The Trento Conference, ed. James F. Keenan (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 116–24. Ibid., 119. Ibid. Ibid., 120. According to the 2007 US Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 83 percent of Black Americans identify as either Protestant or Catholic. This does not include those who identify with the Orthodox Church or with related denominations that are considered outside of mainstream Christianity (e.g., Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses).

27

White Feminist Theologies and Black Womanist Theologies Karen Teel

Autobiographical introduction Navigating what bell hooks calls “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,”1 women have struggled to claim the authority to speak from our own experiences, to define ourselves, and to choose the words used to describe us. I read hooks as describing a “matrix of domination”2 that is not reducible to any of its components: imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, or patriarchy. Within that matrix, the power to name has been central to the complex relationship between white feminist theologies and black womanist theologies. These negotiations require a delicate mix of sensitivity, humility, self-awareness, and creativity that white feminist scholars collectively have yet to achieve. My own social positioning as a white feminist theologian is germane to this subject, so I begin autobiographically. Having grown up white and Roman Catholic in south central Washington State, I was drawn into the study of theology through required undergraduate religion courses at Jesuit-run Gonzaga University. Captivated by the notion of a career spent thinking about God, I entered graduate school in theology at Boston College. My training there eventually culminated in a doctoral dissertation on womanist theologies, directed by the noted Catholic theologian Dr. M. Shawn Copeland. In this dissertation, which later became a book,3 I attempted, from my perspective as a white Christian woman, to learn from black Christian women’s critical analyses of their struggles to live as full human persons created in the image of God in light of the ongoing reality of racism. I am now a tenured professor at the University of San Diego, where I teach courses in Christianity, including Catholicism. These courses support not only the religion requirement, but also the diversity requirement, educating students to reflect critically upon their own and others’ experiences of social oppression and privilege and to analyze power inequities among social groups, including in churches. I live with my two children (both white) in the diverse City Heights neighborhood of San Diego; they attend a Spanish-immersion elementary school; and we worship at an historically black Catholic church. At this point in my life, my primary scholarly, teaching, and personal endeavors coalesce around attempts at constructive engagement with racism and white supremacy.

368

Handbook of African American Theology

As a white feminist theologian, I view my dialogue with womanist theologies as an endeavor both necessary and unavoidably fraught. (Had I not discerned this for myself, it would have been communicated to me by the skeptical looks of womanist theologians I met at conferences and told of my dissertation research—looks that resolved to relief when I mentioned my advisor’s name.) Given my unfairly privileged status as white, I cannot responsibly ignore the wisdom of black women. I have a moral obligation to seek out the conversion and transformation that their words inspire. At the same time, given my unfairly privileged status as white, I am always actively participating in the social, political, ecclesial, and academic power dynamics that persist in valuing my work, thought, and being over black women’s. When I allow womanist ideas to shape my own, then, I simultaneously fulfill a vital responsibility and use womanists’ work to advance my own career. This process works to my benefit, even when I critique it. In the ongoing matrix of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, this is a double bind of which many white feminist theologians seem unaware and from which we cannot escape. In order to dialogue productively with black womanist theologians, and to practice liberatory feminism authentically and efficaciously, each of us must cultivate a nuanced, self-critical awareness of our own oppressive participation in the matrix.

The emergence of feminist and womanist theologies Theology is defined as “faith seeking understanding,” and in this broad sense, women of faith—which includes most women in the history of the United States—have always been thinking theologically. Women’s widespread insistence on having our perspectives taken seriously in the public sphere, including in churches and theology, is often named “feminism” and said anachronistically4 to have begun in 1848, when about two hundred white women and forty men—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Frederick Douglass, the only black attendee—convened at Seneca Falls in New York. They issued a document asserting women’s rights including, at Douglass’s insistence, the right to vote. As the century progressed, women including Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were key players in the movement. This movement was characterized by struggle over how to balance working toward black male suffrage and women’s suffrage, as well as by theological inquiry. For example, in the 1890s, Stanton assembled over two dozen women to write The Woman’s Bible, a commentary on the Church of England’s English-language Revised Version of the Bible; and Wells-Barnett’s The Red Record framed lynching as a heinous practice that was all the more horrifying for being carried out by Christians. Once women achieved the right to vote in 1920, feminism largely receded from public view until the 1960s. The modern Women’s Movement, including women’s approaches to theology, began to arise as the Civil Rights Movement was achieving its major legislative gains. In white feminist theological hindsight, a 1960 essay by Valerie Saiving Goldstein appears to have signaled the coming revolution.5 Saiving Goldstein noted that Christian tradition considered pride to be the most common sin and its remedy as being self-sacrificial; she argued that this may be true for men, but since women’s more common problem was self-negation, women’s sin was not pride but failure to value and care for the self

White Feminist and Black Womanist Theologies

369

adequately. By pointing out that theology cannot be one-size-fits-all, Saiving Goldstein set the stage for women to develop distinctive theological methodologies that would gain a serious hearing in the previously all-white-male academy. White women began to be admitted to the academic study of theology at the Ph.D. level in significant numbers in the late 1960s, and black women in the 1970s. In the 1970s, black feminists such as hooks, Michele Wallace, and Angela Davis began responding to and correcting both sexism in the freedom movement and racism in the women’s movement. This tension inevitably shaped the work and interactions of theologians. Some white thinkers, such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, were deeply engaged with the question of race from the beginning.6 Yet many imagined that the struggle against patriarchy was shared straightforwardly by all women—in other words, that sexism was the most important issue women faced, regardless of race, class, or other factors. Black feminists disagreed. They saw patriarchy and sexism as inseparable from racism, classism, heterocentrism, and other problems. In 1979, in a letter that has taken on legendary status among theologians, black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde critiqued white Catholic (later post-Catholic) feminist thinker Mary Daly for what Lorde considered Daly’s misappropriation of Lorde’s words to adorn her white feminist ideas, namely using them as the epigraph for a chapter on female genital mutilation in Africa.7 While Daly’s use of Lorde’s work may have seemed radical to white readers, Lorde asked whether Daly took Lorde seriously as an equal conversation partner with whose ideas she must reckon.8 A few months later, Lorde rebuked white feminists, including Daly, for ignoring racism and homophobia in a conference panel presentation entitled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”9 Lorde’s challenge reverberates to the present: white feminist theologians who aspire to seek liberation for all women must “really read the work of Black women,”10 allowing them to transform how we see the world and how we craft our theologies. Around the same time that Lorde took Daly to task, the poet and novelist Alice Walker invented the term “womanist.” The most well-known definition of the term forms the frontispiece for Walker’s 1983 collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: 1. From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “You acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious. 2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige and black?” Ans. “Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.”

370

Handbook of African American Theology

Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.” 3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. 4. Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.11

While Walker’s definition has shaped entire projects,12 two elements are most relevant here. First, in part one, a womanist is a defined as “a black feminist or feminist of color,” indicating that the terms “black feminist” and “womanist” are not mutually exclusive. Second, in part four, womanism is evidently deeper or more comprehensive than feminism.13 Some black Christian women studying theology recognized themselves in Walker’s term, and they soon adopted it to indicate the distinctiveness of their approaches. In 1985, in a collaborative effort that did not yet deploy the term “womanism,” the Mud Flower Collective, an interracial group of Christian theologians, published God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education. It includes chapters authored by the group, letters exchanged by members, and storytelling as a necessary prelude to theological reflection.14 In a more academically traditional essay published in 1986, “The Color of Feminism: Or Speaking the Black Woman’s Tongue,” Delores S. Williams outlined why black women did not necessarily identify with white feminists.15 By addressing multiple axes of oppression simultaneously, Williams distinguished her approach from white feminist theology’s prioritization of gender. Within a year, Williams and others were deploying the term “womanist” to describe their endeavors to theologize from their perspectives as black women. Again in hindsight, Williams’s article can be seen as signaling the turn to womanism, parallel to Saiving Goldstein’s feminist turn twenty-five years earlier. Systematic theologian Kelly Brown Douglas remembers the conflict she felt in following her vocation to the mostly male Episcopalian priesthood: “I did not know where I was going to fit in, with the feminist [sic] or with the brothers. And so, when I first read Alice Walker’s words . . . with tears in my eyes I jumped out of my chair and leaped into the air shouting, ‘This is it! This is it!’ ”16 In 1987, Katie Cannon, a member of the Mud Flower Collective whose Black Womanist Ethics would appear in 1988, published an essay asking white feminists not to adopt the word “womanist” to describe themselves— not because solidarity was impossible or undesirable, but because black women needed a distinctive term to identify their contributions.17 Womanist theology was christened. In a 1989 roundtable in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, black Christian women theologians considered whether it was appropriate for them to use the term “womanist.”18 In question was the definition’s openness to same-sex-loving relationships as well as the pagan beliefs of its creator. Cheryl Sanders, the organizer, opined that one could not adopt the term and remain authentically Christian. Her interlocutors generally disagreed, and they continued to use it. In 2006, in the same journal, process theologian Monica Coleman hosted another roundtable, entitled “Must I Be Womanist?”19 Articulating her dilemma, Coleman explained that while she resonated with certain themes in womanist thought, especially in Walker’s definition, she was wary of the title because of Christian womanist theologians’ history of silence on the

White Feminist and Black Womanist Theologies

371

question of same-sex-loving relationships. She worried about active homophobia within the womanist movement, as well as its lack of engagement with non-Christian religions. Again, the interlocutors largely argued for the term’s flexibility. Since this discussion, Coleman has included the identifier “womanist” in the titles of two of her books, even as she draws increasingly from pastoral and process theologies. That she has done so despite her publicly acknowledged misgivings illustrates how powerful the term has become as a signifier for black women’s intersectional, justice-oriented approaches in religion and theology.20 Naming has remained flexible. While many black Christian women theologians embrace Walker’s term as one that fits their work, not all do so. Ethicist Traci West, for example, identifies her work as “black feminist,” following sociologist Patricia Hill Collins.21 Further, womanists now disagree about whether the field is established enough for people who are not black women or women of color to self-describe as “womanist,” as has happened with the term “feminist” (i.e., men can be feminists), or whether the name should still be restricted to those whose perspectives the field represents, to ensure that they control its evolving shape.22 Consistently, womanists have welcomed everyone to utilize their ideas and insights, yet naming remains important because women of color still struggle for recognition and respect in the academy. This debate represents the drive to survive, thrive, and self-define. For her part, West does not use any term as universally including all women; rather, she refers consistently to “feminist and womanist” approaches. She insists that “a critique of power relations, including those that inform women’s experiences with each other, must always be the starting point for liberative feminist and womanist social ethics.”23 In the end, labels matter less than whether we are shattering unjust power structures in our quest for survival and quality of life for all.24 Recently, womanist theologians have been producing dynamic, cutting-edge works with scant reference to white feminism. Examples include Kelly Brown Douglas’s work on black bodies, M. Shawn Copeland’s anthropology, Eboni Marshall Turman’s reading of the council of Chalcedon, Stephanie Crumpton’s pastoral theology, and Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder’s biblical scholarship.25 Nyasha Junior does not call her biblical scholarship “womanist” or “feminist” but utilizes both approaches, troubling taken-forgranted distinctions between the two.26 In the first openly lesbian womanist monograph, Pamela Lightsey reports that she was “stunned” to find that black Christian women had adopted Alice Walker’s definition despite its affirmation of sexual diversity; nevertheless, concurring that LGBTIQ experiences should be included in womanism, she concludes that lack of overt exclusion allows inclusion.27 The fact that none of these texts draw substantially on white feminist theologies suggests that these theologies are not essential to womanist thought. Why might this be?

White feminist theological engagement with black womanist theologies Black womanist theologians consistently insist that the problem we all face is bigger and more complex than patriarchy, even while aiming for solidarity across racial lines.

372

Handbook of African American Theology

For Coleman, West, and others, solidarity is more important than naming. This focus may resonate with white feminist theologians who still tend to cherish the vision of a global sisterhood united against patriarchy and who strongly desire to be seen as standing in solidarity with women of color, especially black women. Such thinkers commonly describe women’s theological approaches—womanist, feminist, mujerista, and so on—as generally well-established and on roughly equal footing. Imagining ourselves as marching forward in solidarity with all women, we remain focused on patriarchy as the source of all the ills that plague humanity. I contend, however, that our leap to solidarity exposes insufficient attention to our own implication in the concrete realities that these theologies describe. Four examples will illustrate. First, Helene Tallon Russell introduces the topic of feminist theology in a co-edited 2011 volume on “women’s theology.” She notes the longstanding controversies over naming women’s experiences, acknowledges that the history of “feminism” itself is contested and ambiguous, and grants that the history of the term includes important questions about power, often having privileged white women’s views. Having said all this, Russell states that she wishes to reclaim the term feminist and assert that a feminist or a woman seeking liberation can be of any ethnic origin or race, any class, any religion, any sexual orientation, en-abled in any way, etc. Toward being as inclusive as possible I will use a few different nomenclatures, such as women’s liberation theology and feminist theology to denote an approach to theology that is of, for, and by any women who are seeking liberation from patriarchal norms and phallocentric discourse.28

Earlier in this paragraph, Russell mentions “womanist” and “mujerista” approaches as recently-arisen varieties of feminism. They do not, however, make her list of “inclusive . . . nomenclatures.” This begs the question: if power is now equally shared among women, should all such terms—rather than only some—be interchangeable? If they are not, why not? Russell proceeds without addressing such questions. Instead, having acknowledged the complex and problematic history of using “feminist” as an umbrella term, she simply continues the practice. In a similar vein, and in the same volume, Nancy Howell states, “What must be confessed is that the earliest published feminist process-relational theologies were generated by white women, with a few notable exceptions.” In a footnote, Howell names Asian American theologian Rita Nakashima Brock as one of the exceptions. Howell then notes approvingly that “the community of women scholars and students” is now diverse in terms of social location, theological approaches, and race.29 Having acknowledged this history, yet without critically examining her own provocative statement that white women’s role in this history is something to “be confessed,” Howell too simply proceeds with her essay. In her own words, “Sometimes commitments and criteria are easier to articulate than to achieve.”30 A third example is Anne Clifford’s useful text Introducing Feminist Theology.31 By the time this book appeared, women of color had been insisting for decades that the problem is much more complex than patriarchy, and Clifford duly includes their views in every chapter. Yet she elides their complexity when she states that “patriarchy has

White Feminist and Black Womanist Theologies

373

legitimated many forms of oppression in addition to sexism” and identifies slavery and European colonialism as being among these “forms of oppression.”32 Like Russell and Howell, Clifford labels all women’s liberationist theologies as “feminist.” Her failure to address white women’s dual positioning as oppressed and oppressor may be what leads her to replicate historic power structures in each chapter by describing white women’s ideas first and women of color’s second, in separate sections. This procedure has the effect of framing nonwhite women’s theologies as variations on a dominant theme, rather than as distinctive approaches with unique concerns whose far-reaching critiques might undermine the white feminist theological project’s emphasis on patriarchy. Finally, Elizabeth Johnson has edited a valuable volume bringing together global women’s Christologies.33 Reading through it, one notices that the white contributors mostly ponder patriarchy and sexism, while the nonwhite thinkers mount more complex analyses.34 That the white feminists consistently focus on patriarchy seems to indicate that they do not see nonwhite women’s analyses as relevant to themselves personally. In addition to “confessing” the past, as these authors do, I suggest that white feminist theologians need to interrogate our present for the continuation of that past. We must identify and address persistent power imbalances that flow from these trajectories. We can learn to do this from nonwhite women. But we don’t have to read their works to realize that we have benefited from imperialism and colonialism along with white men. We simply need to notice that white women participated in enslaving Africans, displacing Native Americans, marginalizing Latino/as, and excluding Asians, and that we continue to benefit from white dominance today. I submit, then, that this strategy of identifying men or patriarchy as responsible for slavery and colonialism functions to get white women off the hook. It frees us to imagine that we are in uncomplicated solidarity with women of color fighting “the man.” In reality, our position is complex. We are both oppressor and oppressed. For various reasons, many white feminists are more interested in our oppression than our oppressiveness. Yet, in so far as a primary task of womanist theology is to resist the “sin of whiteness,”35 womanists are resisting something in which white women participate. Our blindness to this significant dimension of our multifaceted experiences actually militates against our stated feminist goal of full liberation for all women. Sometimes we get distracted by our own good intentions. For example, we may become preoccupied with or anxious over whether people think we are racist. To give a recent example, several years ago, prominent feminist theologian Carol Christ wondered why publicly Mary Daly did not get more support from other white feminists in the exchange with Audre Lorde mentioned above. In this blog post, Christ acknowledges that racism is a problem but insists that it is unfair to call all white feminists racist.36 Scholars have noted how unproductive this fixation can be.37 While Christ does not intend to minimize the problem of racism, she appears not to have considered that when one is embedded in a white supremacist society, one can be consciously anti-racist and yet also still deeply racist, in a way that is largely beyond one’s control.38 In this context, it is dangerous to leave any room for the implication that white women’s comfort—namely, our desire to be seen as well-intentioned, not to be thought racist—is more important than our failure to engage adequately with black women’s thought, or with racism itself, including our own.

374

Handbook of African American Theology

I argue, then, that white feminists should not attempt to subsume black women’s or women of color’s concerns into our own. Our implication in imperialist whitesupremacist capitalist patriarchy makes this impossible; moreover, this expansionist tendency bears a distinct resemblance to the colonialist and imperialist conquest that women of color, including womanist theologians, have always been resisting. Rather than seeking acceptance and affirmation from women of color, including womanist theologians, white feminist theologians should critique our own participation in legacies of conquest. If we sincerely desire all women’s flourishing, we will develop and deploy concrete strategies to identify and interrupt our own oppressive practices.

Conclusion: engaging black womanist theologians’ concerns White women are still over-empowered by racialization. As it did in God’s Fierce Whimsy, the convergence of women’s critiques can create opportunities for individual and collective action. I have maintained that, to actualize this possibility, white feminist theologians individually must engage in critical self-reflection and address our participation in imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. This is difficult and necessary work. It is a prerequisite to the authentic practice of feminism, in so far as liberatory feminism requires effective collaboration among all women to challenge heteropatriarchy, racialization and white supremacy, and the settler colonial nationstate. There have always been white feminist theologians who constructively engage womanist concerns. Some have read womanist work deeply and written about it in detail. Early examples include Barbara Hilkert Andolsen’s “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks” and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite’s Sex, Race, and God.39 Like them, as noted, I developed my own stance through engagement with womanist theologies. And in Beyond Apathy, my contemporary Elisabeth Vasko draws substantially on womanist thought to address homophobia, white supremacy, and bullying.40 Further, an increasing number of white feminist theologians are critiquing imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy without explicitly engaging womanist theologies at length. In The Sin of White Supremacy, Jeannine Hill Fletcher undertakes a sustained critique of the Christian origins of white supremacy in Christian colonialism and supersessionism. Without citing many womanist thinkers, she critiques the same unjust social and ecclesial dynamics that they do.41 In A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed, Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Marcia Mount Shoop tackle racism in their tradition, the Presbyterian Church (USA).42 Katie Grimes’s Christ Divided takes on “anti-blackness supremacy” in an historical approach to virtue ethics.43 Mary E. Hobgood, Jennifer Harvey, and other white thinkers have wrestled with racism and white supremacy by taking responsibility in a self-aware manner.44 Thus, degrees of engagement with womanist thought vary. But however we enter the conversation, we are following Emilie Townes’s powerful womanist directive to do something about “whiteness” and “uninterrogated coloredness.”45 In the end, this matters more than whether we undertake the study of particular womanist theologies, though doing so is always valuable.

White Feminist and Black Womanist Theologies

375

White feminist theologians cannot escape the double bind of attending to and benefiting unfairly from black women’s and women of color’s work. What we can do is to work as responsibly as possible, striving to ensure that, as generations pass, the power shifts. As Coleman notes, the academy generally expects black female religious scholars to have expertise in womanist theology, regardless of their interests.46 It is past time for white feminist theologians to engage black women as our equals, not only as womanists or in work that pertains to black women’s concerns, but in all areas. To that end, it is instructive to note that many academic departments of theology and religion employ white women faculty but still lack black women faculty. For white feminists in such departments, perhaps even more important than internalizing black women’s concerns is doing the transformative internal and external work necessary for us to hire black women and women of color. Then, as colleagues and equal partners, we may become able to join forces to expose and oppose the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal matrix in our departments, our institutions, our disciplines, and our world.47

Notes See bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Atria, 2004), 17. 2 See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Revised Tenth Anniversary edn. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1999). 3 Karen Teel, Racism and the Image of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 4 The term “feminist” entered common usage in the late 1800s. Nyasha Junior, An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 7. 5 Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” The Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (April 1960): 100–12. 6 For example, see Rosemary Ruether, “Crisis in Sex and Race: Black Theology vs. Feminist Theology,” Christianity and Crisis 34, no. 6 (April 15, 1974): 67–73. 7 Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984), 66–71; Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978). 8 For an account of Daly’s response to this letter and Lorde and Daly’s subsequent interactions, see Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 233–8, 246–8. 9 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984), 110–13. 10 Lorde, “Open Letter,” 68. 11 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1983), xi–xii. 12 One volume constructed according to Walker’s definition is Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, edited by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

1

376

Handbook of African American Theology

13 For an interpretation of Walker’s definition as prophecy, see Letty M. Russell, “Lavender Celebrates Purple: A White Feminist Response,” in Deeper Shades of Purple, ed. Floyd-Thomas, 260–4. 14 Katie G. Cannon, Beverly W. Harrison, Carter Heyward, Ada-Maria Isasi-Diaz, Bess B. Johnson, Mary D. Pellauer, and Nancy D. Richardson, God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education (New York: Pilgrim, 1985). For the importance of storytelling, see p. 135. 15 Delores S. Williams, “The Color of Feminism: Or Speaking the Black Woman’s Tongue,” Journal of Religious Thought 43, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1986): 42–58. 16 Kelly Brown Douglas, “Twenty Years a Womanist: An Affirming Challenge,” in Deeper Shades of Purple, ed. Floyd-Thomas, 145–57, at 146. 17 Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1988); “Not Easy,” Other Side 33, no. 1 (January–February 1997): 38–9, 41. 18 Cheryl J. Sanders et al., “Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 83–112. 19 Monica Coleman et al., “Must I Be Womanist?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22, no. 1 (2006): 85–134. 20 In 1989, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how oppressions combine to form distinctive experiences. This term is now used across many disciplines, including increasingly in theology. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–99. 21 See Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). Stephanie Y. Mitchem discusses the naming debate in Introducing Womanist Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), chapter 5. 22 Monica Coleman argues that black women cannot “own” the term “womanist.” See the Introduction to Ain’t I a Womanist Too? Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought, ed. Monica A. Coleman, 1–31 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013), at 16–19. Conversely, Diana Hayes maintains that a womanist must be a black woman or woman of color. See “Standing in the Shoes My Mother Made: The Making of a Catholic Womanist Theologian,” in Deeper Shades of Purple, ed. Floyd-Thomas, 54–76, at 55, 74 (note 2). 23 West, Disruptive Christian Ethics, 48–9, emphasis added. Some white feminists proceed similarly; for example, Mary Hunt employs the hybrid “feminist/womanist” in “Unfinished Business: The Flowering of Feminist/Womanist Theologies,” in Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 79–92. 24 Delores S. Williams proposes that God sometimes chooses people’s survival and quality of life over their liberation in Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993). 25 Kelly Brown Douglas, Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2015); M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2010); Eboni Marshall Turman, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Stephanie M. Crumpton, A Womanist Pastoral Theology against Intimate and Cultural Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, When Momma

White Feminist and Black Womanist Theologies

26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43

377

Speaks: The Bible and Motherhood from a Womanist Perspective (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016). Junior, An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation, xxi. Pamela R. Lightsey, Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015), xi. Helene Tallon Russell, “Introduction to Feminist Theology,” in Creating Women’s Theology: A Movement Engaging Process Thought, ed. Monica A. Coleman, Nancy R. Howell, and Helene Tallon Russell (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 3–11, at 4. Nancy R. Howell, “Women, Whitehead, and Hartshorne: What Characterizes ProcessRelational Women’s Worldviews,” in Creating Women’s Theology: A Movement Engaging Process Thought, ed. Monica A. Coleman, Nancy R. Howell, and Helene Tallon Russell (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 20–30, at 23. Ibid. Anne M. Clifford, Introducing Feminist Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001). Ibid., 31. In contrast, Mitchem’s Introducing Womanist Theology emphasizes the historical tensions between white and black women, including in theology. Elizabeth Johnson, ed., The Strength of Her Witness: Jesus Christ in the Global Voices of Women (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2016). I describe this dynamic in my review of Johnson’s book, published at CatholicBooksReview.org (2016) (accessed March 25, 2019). http://catholicbooksreview. org/2016/Johnson-2.html Turman attributes this phrase to Kelly Brown Douglas in Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation, 153. Carol P. Christ, “What Does It Mean to Say that All White Feminists Are Racist?” Feminism and Religion (October 7, 2011) (accessed March 25, 2019). https:// feminismandreligion.com/2011/10/07/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-all-whitefeminists-are-racist-questions-posed-to-white-womenmyself-about-our-part-in-thedialogue-with-women-of-color-by-carol-p-christ/ See, for example, Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010). See George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), chapter 7; Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), chapter 6. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks”: Racism and American Feminism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986); Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White (New York: Crossroad, 1989). Elisabeth T. Vasko, Beyond Apathy: A Theology for Bystanders (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015). Jeannine Hill Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, & Religious Diversity in America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017). Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Marcia Mount Shoop, A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015). Katie Walker Grimes, Christ Divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017).

378

Handbook of African American Theology

44 Mary Elizabeth Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2000); Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014). 45 Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 46 Coleman et al., “Must I Be Womanist?” 92–3. 47 I am grateful to Dr. Christopher Carter for helping me to sharpen the argument of this essay.

28

Jewish Theology and African American Theology in Dialogue Kurt Buhring

When considering African American experiences of slavery and racism and Jewish experiences of the Holocaust,1 it is important to understand that each event and experience of horrendous evil is unique. Despite this, surprisingly there has not been much dialogue between black and Jewish theologians on the topic of suffering and evil.2 Nevertheless, similarities and parallels exist among the range of responses of African American and Jewish theologians to these realities. Most black and Jewish theologians insist that evil be treated as a concrete, experiential reality rather than an abstract, philosophical dilemma. Suffering and evil pose real problems for black and Jewish theists. While some black and Jewish thinkers argue for atheism or humanism in the face of suffering and evil, most draw from the Bible and the wider religious traditions and craft original ways of conceiving of God. Given similarities of responses, my hope is for fruitful dialogue between African American and Jewish theologies in terms of the concepts of God and human nature. One aspect of this hope for an exploration of these theologies is to find meaningful and relevant ways of understanding suffering and evil as well as effective ways of responding to these realities. Such a pursuit is important not only for African Americans and Jews, but also for any believer in God.

Cone, Fackenheim, and the classical view of God The dominant trend in both African American and Jewish theologies, represented by James Cone and Emil Fackenheim respectively, is to argue for the continuing relevance of God and belief in a basically classical theology despite experiences of suffering and evil.3 Further, both Cone and Fackenheim argue for human responsibility in addressing instances of moral evil. Once these thinkers are explored and critiqued briefly, the focus of this essay is on the theological and anthropological outcomes which may emerge from conversations between these theologians and those who have taken up similar themes more recently. Though classical theological concepts may provide meaning and sustain efforts to resist evil, the reformulation of theological models in

380

Handbook of African American Theology

light of events and experiences of suffering and evil may be necessary. While thinkers such as Cone and Fackenheim importantly base their ideas in the experiences of the suffering and craft meaningful, powerful theologies, different theological models might provide alternative grounds for hope and resistance. There are two primary similarities in the theologies that emerge along these lines that might be further explored. The first is an opening up of the category of God. On the African American side, Dwight Hopkins’s concept of the Holy Spirit allows for creative developments. Likewise, on the Jewish side, Melissa Raphael’s treatment of Shekhinah is especially relevant. Each of these thinkers envisions a God who is still powerful, but in a more subtle and persuasive manner than found in classical views. In these theologies, divine goodness and immanent presence are emphasized. These theological shifts are related to the second similarity which is evident among recent African American and Jewish theologies. As divine presence is understood in a more relational and subtle sense, human responsibility for confronting evil becomes more urgent. When putting African American theology and Jewish theology into conversation, an obvious starting point is James Cone and Emil Fackenheim.4 Each theologian should be considered the founding figure within the modern developments of his tradition. Here, two points of engagement between these thinkers will be explored. First, both theologians make the valid claim that the problem of suffering and evil must be understood as the problem of particular experiences of suffering and specific manifestations of evil. Second, both theologians craft basically classical views of divine power and presence, though they develop the implications of these views in different ways. By this it is meant that Cone and Fackenheim ultimately maintain a belief in a God who is all-powerful and transcendent; while Cone uses this foundation to develop his Christology, and thus the basis for hope, Fackenheim uses this basis to craft a theology that depends on rare human acts of resistance. After examining these select issues in Cone and Fackenheim, some critical voices will be employed briefly as a transition to a final portion of the essay. On the first issue of the need to understand suffering and evil in their particular, specific forms, Cone and Fackenheim make similar arguments regarding the contextual nature of all theology. Though Cone and Fackenheim differ in their specific theological claims and their selection of social and historical events that they regard as important, each thinker denies that theology may be formed in an historical vacuum. Both Cone and Fackenheim reacted to a conservative theological context in which universality and objectivity were understood to be necessary for meaningful theological assertions. Neither theologian could ignore the importance of his own community’s experiences in the twentieth century. Both Cone and Fackenheim attempt to maintain a faithfulness to the universal truth claims of their own religious tradition while simultaneously responding to the profound events of their times. Suffering and evil should not be considered in abstract ways, but must be wrestled with in their very particular, concrete, and messy manifestations.5 In addition to arguing for an understanding of the particularity of experiences of suffering and evil, Cone and Fackenheim also craft a concept of God who is ultimately omnipotent and transcendent. Both Cone and Fackenheim allow for a robust understanding of human freedom, but they each place a far greater emphasis on divine omnipotence. Though certainly immanent in human history and within humanity

Jewish and African American Theology

381

itself at times in vitally important ways, God in both Cone’s and Fackenheim’s theologies is largely transcendent to the failures and frailties of human history. Both thinkers exhibit the Barthian/Kierkegaardian tendency of emphasizing the ultimate qualitative distinction and hierarchy between God and humanity. Whereas for Cone, God’s power and transcendence as manifested in the resurrection of Jesus Christ provide the grounds for hope in the face of suffering and evil, for Fackenheim God’s power and transcendence were muted during the Holocaust and depend on human ethical response, which was evident though exceptional.

James Cone’s view of God as liberator of the oppressed As described above, Cone attempts to critique the falsely claimed close alliance that he saw between white racist theologies and the will of God, while simultaneously wanting to align divine will and preference with the black experience. In his attack on racist theology, Cone argues for God’s transcendence over human culture and society, saying that white Christianity was not truly Christian.6 In distinction, Cone believes that God’s immanence was evident in black culture and Christianity. He argues that this divine preference for and immanence in the black experience was not simply a racial matter, but rather an issue of which type of Christianity best understood and expressed the liberative will of God that, for Cone, was so obviously the message of the Bible and the mission of Christ.7 Cone pushes the notion of divine immanence within black culture only so far, though. Though in different ways, just as whites could sin, blacks could do so as well. Black sin, understood as not seeing through racist ideology and struggling for one’s freedom alongside God, could result in the failure of the liberation struggle if there were no divine transcendence.8 God’s omnipotence and transcendence assures the virtual inevitable liberation of the oppressed, according to Cone. These divine traits are the basis for black hope and faith. When humanity falls short of social justice and liberation, which commonly occurs as the history of racism in the United States attests to, God’s transcendence and omnipotence mean that God does not let us fall short in the end.9 Cone maintains that God acts in history as liberator of the oppressed, most compellingly so in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The quintessential conception of the divine in Christian theology is incarnational. Certainly, Cone’s naming of God as liberator is founded on the stories of the Exodus and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. However, it is the fact that God decisively enters into history as Jesus Christ that most profoundly indicates God’s relationship to humanity of simultaneous love for the oppressed and justice for the oppressor. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, God acts in such a way always, argues Cone. Liberation is already, but not yet, accomplished for the oppressed in Jesus Christ. Granted, suffering and oppression still exist; furthermore, humans play a role in the struggle for liberation in utilizing the freedom granted to them by the already-won victory in Christ. Yet, redemption and liberation are assured because of the activity of Jesus Christ. In the face of continuing black oppression, Cone can maintain faith in an inevitable liberation because he understands the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to be the central act of liberation in history. No matter the

382

Handbook of African American Theology

severity of suffering and evil, Cone uses Jesus Christ as the definitive and victorious response.10 To be sure, Cone admits that divine power does not mean that God can do whatever God wants to do. He advocates a strong notion of human freedom, but always understands this freedom within the context of divine power.11 Cone does not appeal to human freedom, however, when dealing with the problem of why there is black suffering if God acts as omnipotent liberator. Rather, he responds to the theodicy problem by appealing to the lived faith of Christian African Americans. Cone backs away from a philosophical response to black suffering, claiming that such an approach would be too abstract and alien to black faith. He thinks that the lived faith of black Christians overcomes the apparent paradox of continued suffering by maintaining a simultaneous human drive for liberation and an assured faith that God is liberator and that suffering will be redeemed. In other words, given his conception of divine transcendence and omnipotence, there is no real theodicy problem for Cone.12

Emil Fackenheim’s view of God as commanding presence Like Cone, Fackenheim argues against either extreme of a God who is too far or too near. The God of the Jewish tradition is a personal God who enters into a covenant with Israel, but remains always Other to Israel. Fackenheim calls this the principle of the intimacy of the divine infinity. Arguing against modern secularism, Fackenheim asserts that God is deeply and intimately involved in Israel’s affairs. The divine and the human move toward one another as it were. Israel’s history and welfare affect God’s very being in a sense here. Although at times Fackenheim maintains a balance between this divine intimacy with Israel and divine transcendence, he focuses primarily on divine omnipotence and transcendence.13 After the events of the twentieth century, Fackenheim opposes what he believed were too naive and optimistic conceptions of divine power and presence in modern thought because they ignored the realities of the Holocaust. He criticizes theologies that mitigated divine power in the name of human free will. A God who lacks power would not be the God of the Hebrew Bible and would not be worth praying to.14 Fackenheim also rejects Christianity’s incarnational view of God in Jesus. He thinks that the Christian doctrine of incarnation was impossible for Judaism because he interprets this to mean the identification of the divine with human nature. There could be no mixing of divinity and humanity. If the two did not remain ultimately separate, the Jewish covenant would cease to exist. There could be no covenantal relationship if there were only one party.15 Fackenheim’s understanding of the divine–human relationship, like Cone’s, is based initially on the stories of the Hebrew Bible. For Fackenheim, as for Cone, God enters into a special relationship with a particular community of people, not all people in general. Whereas for Cone this community is the community of the oppressed, for Fackenheim God enters into a covenantal relationship with Israel. This covenantal relationship obliges Israel’s allegiance and obedience with no guarantees of inevitable benevolence. God is present as both saving and commanding force in the root experiences of Judaism, the Exodus, and Sinai.16 This divine presence and the nature of

Jewish and African American Theology

383

the covenant are brought into question if not entirely destroyed by the Holocaust. Fackenheim argues that the Holocaust creates a rupture in the possibility of a return to the root experiences of the past. Unlike for Cone, then, contemporary Jewish suffering and despair profoundly bring into question the nature and reality of the divine–human relationship of covenant. There is no already accomplished victory to which Fackenheim may appeal to point to inevitable redemption or to a still vital covenant. During and after the Holocaust, Fackenheim offers, God is present as commanding voice. God commands that Jews not give Hitler posthumous victories by despairing of either God of humanity.17 Fackenheim’s later work suggests that divine saving presence may be hinted at in human acts of tikkun olam, or mending of the world.18

Divine–human relationship in the theologies of Cone and Fackenheim The nature of the divine–human relation for Cone and Fackenheim then is shaped by the central faith claims of their respective traditions. For Cone, this relationship is expressed most profoundly in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. While the incarnation means that God identifies as and suffers with the oppressed, the resurrection transforms suffering into decisively liberating redemption. Jesus’s resurrection, according to Cone, indicates that this liberating relationship characterizes God’s relation to the oppressed of all times. For Fackenheim, the divine–human relationship is expressed in God’s covenant with a particular people, Israel. This is a relationship of both love and obligation. The Hebrew Bible is full of stories of Israel straying from and returning to God and of God’s responsive love and justice toward Israel. Jewish suffering during this time is explained by the claim that it is deserved as a result of the sins of Israel. Such an explanation for suffering becomes obscene in the face of the murder of one million Jewish children during the Holocaust. Here, Jewish suffering cannot be understood as divine punishment for straying from the covenant. During the Holocaust, it seems, it is God who strays from the covenant with Israel.19 Fackenheim asserts that, for now at least, after the Holocaust God must be understood as commanding presence only, with no assurance of salvation given the realities and horrors of the Holocaust. These sufferings of history, for Fackenheim, do bring into question the nature of the covenantal relationship with Israel in a way that black suffering challenges Cone’s notion of God as liberator of the oppressed, but never destroys it. Despite experiences of suffering and evil, then, Cone maintains belief in a good God, who liberates the oppressed, and Fackenheim argues that God still exists as a Commanding Presence whose activity is evident in Jewish acts of resistance and tikkun.

Critique of Cone’s and Fackenheim’s theological perspectives Though there is certainly a wide variety of African American and Jewish theological assessments of suffering and evil, there are a few thinkers who engage the foundational

384

Handbook of African American Theology

work of Cone and Fackenheim in ways especially relevant to this essay. Within African American theology, William R. Jones’s Is God a White Racist? challenges Cone’s assumption of divine goodness. He argues that, given the history of slavery and racism, Cone has no grounds for claiming that God is a benevolent and liberating force in the lives of African Americans. Thus, Jones questions the central presupposition of Cone’s model of God as liberator of the oppressed.20 Following Jones, Anthony Pinn’s Why Lord? pushes this critique even further, arguing against theism and advocating for black humanism.21 In addition, Pinn and Delores Williams each take on Cone’s implicit acceptance of the idea of redemptive suffering. Both claim that suffering should not be understood as redemptive, and thus in some sense positive, and that such an understanding was counterproductive and harmful to the well-being of the oppressed. Finally, Williams also questions the centrality of the idea of liberation in Cone’s theology. Through the lens of the biblical figure Hagar, Williams claims that a God who fosters survival rather than outright liberation resonates more strongly with many black women.22 Within Jewish theology, Richard Rubenstein, a contemporary of Fackenheim, believes God’s goodness, power, presence, and activity are no longer evident. He argues that, after the Holocaust, we live in the time of the death of God, and thus, no covenant between a good and active God in history and a faithful, elected Israel exists.23 More recently, Melissa Raphael critiques the patriarchal model of God advocated by Fackenheim and other early male Holocaust thinkers. Drawing from the experiences of Jewish women during the Holocaust, she develops an alternative theological image of divine goodness, power, and presence.24 Though certainly not identical, these conversations among black and Jewish thinkers have parallels. Cone and Fackenheim craft amazingly vibrant and powerful foundations. Other thinkers from the edges offer relevant questions that challenge theism itself. And still other theologians tap into new sources, particularly the experiences of women, to construct, and in important ways renew, creative concepts of God in the face of experiences of suffering and evil. The remainder of this essay will delve into two examples of this constructive theological renewal. In refining the categories of divine power and presence, Dwight N. Hopkins and Melissa Raphael provide theologies that creatively and helpfully place greater emphasis on human acts of resistance against moral evil and suffering. Drawing on Hopkins’s notion of God as the Spirit of Total Liberation in Us and Raphael’s interpretation of divine presence as Shekhinah, we can begin to see theological possibilities that may emerge in an exploration of African American and Jewish theologies in conversation.

Dwight Hopkins’s Trinitarian pneumatology of liberation In Down, Up, and Over,25 Dwight Hopkins agrees with and builds upon Cone’s assertion that God sides with blacks, with the oppressed. Like Cone, Hopkins maintains that the Bible tells the story of a God, the way maker, who liberates the least of society. Hopkins’s God is a God of justice, liberation, creativity, and humor. The aspect of Hopkins’s thought

Jewish and African American Theology

385

upon which I would like to draw is his mitigation of Cone’s emphasis on the role of God in actually carrying out liberation. Here Hopkins differs in degree from Cone rather than in kind. While Cone absolutely expresses the ethical conviction that humans, both oppressed and oppressor, must play a central role in the liberation process, Hopkins articulates a theology that asserts a form of divine presence as human agency, the Spirit of Total Liberation in Us. Thus, Hopkins emphasizes human responsibility and potential for liberation more than Cone does. Hopkins explicitly states that humanity must work with God as co-laborers to bring about liberation, and implicitly shows how this is carried out in his notion of resistance. According to Hopkins, when humans resist oppression and seek liberation, God as the Spirit of Total Liberation in Us is revealed. Focusing on the black experience as a source for his theology, Hopkins shows how God acts in the world—not through overtly stepping into human history to alter its course, but rather through encouraging black resistance, hope, and joy. As a way to express his view of God, Hopkins offers a Trinitarian framework in Down, Up, and Over. He refers to the first person of the Trinity as the Spirit of Total Liberation for Us, the second as the Spirit of Total Liberation with Us, and the third, to whom I want to draw attention, as the Spirit of Total Liberation in Us. While in some ways, Hopkins’s notion of the first person of the Trinity offers fresh nuances of divine power and presence, for me the originality is fully developed in the third person, the Spirit of Total Liberation in Us. Hopkins discusses the presence of the Spirit of Total Liberation in Us as freedom. In God’s gift of life, we receive the breath of life, the Spirit of Freedom. “As an act of grace, God creates through divine freedom women and men by giving them the freedom and liberation inherent in God’s own self.”26 The breath of God and the fact that we are created in God’s image points to the divine gift of our inherent freedom. Hopkins envisions this freedom as holistic. It includes material and spiritual fulfillment. It should be evident both in this life and in the one to come. Hopkins understands freedom primarily as a gift of God’s gracious activity. However, humans often impede the freedom of other humans. When this occurs, as it did during the period when slavery existed, the oppressed have “a divine right to resist.” He writes, “the fundamental purpose of the Spirit of liberation in us is to work in us to help constitute the new self and the new common wealth. Oppressed humanity’s purpose is to think, speak, and practice freedom with the Spirit of liberation in them.”27 According to Hopkins, when humans resist oppression and seek liberation, God as the Spirit of Total Liberation in Us is revealed. This third characteristic of God, which in some ways combines traditional language of the Holy Spirit with a strong assertion of human agency provides a vital and significant component to a fuller development of the concept of resistance as a theological category.

Melissa Raphael’s theology of Shekhinah While Hopkins’s work develops out of Cone’s foundation, Melissa Raphael’s theology responds to the work of male Jewish post-Holocaust theologians, including Emil Fackenheim. In The Female Face of God in Auschwitz Melissa Raphael argues that these

386

Handbook of African American Theology

thinkers largely ignored the experiences of Jewish women during and since the Holocaust. The cost of this failure is the inability to conceive of God as fully present to Israel both during and after the Holocaust in relationships of mutual care. Employing women’s Holocaust memoir literature, Raphael develops a theology of Shekhinah that focuses on the caring relationships among women exhibited in acts such as the washing of the face and body of another person, and in acts of mending and sewing. Like Fackenheim, Raphael builds on the kabbalistic category of tikkun; she argues that these seemingly ordinary acts are in fact simultaneously evidence of divine presence and evocative of the presence of the divine even in Auschwitz, making possible a mending of the ruptures in history, humanity, and within God. Rather than offering a full-out challenge to Fackenheim, Raphael supplements his theology with the range of experiences and acts of resistance of Jews during the Holocaust. When these experiences are explored theologically, Raphael’s resulting model of God allows for a creative and exciting way in which to understand the divine–human relationship and acts of resistance as restoring creation and the divine, as well as providing an ethical demand for care of the other. Within the Talmudic and later kabbalistic traditions, Shekhinah is used to refer to divine presence, particularly in its feminine characteristics. In this form, God is radically immanent, within humanity and human(e) actions, sustaining caring human relationships and simultaneously being restored by these human activities. Raphael draws on the same Lurianic principles of divine–human relationship and tikkun as Fackenheim had done earlier. Raphael explains, “Later Jewish mysticism is founded upon doctrines of creation and redemption where at creation God empties God-self of God so as to enter into a relationship with the world which will not absorb it into the totality of Godhead. And this God’s creation will only be redeemed by the mutuality of divine and human labor; the world is mended not solely from above but also from below.”28 The importance of human activity for the process of redemption is evident in Fackenheim’s theology. It is the type of activity that distinguishes Raphael’s understanding of tikkun from Fackenheim’s. Whereas for Fackenheim maintenance of Jewish identity, resistance to despair, and support for Israel are acts of restoration, for Raphael interpersonal relationships among humans may serve a redemptive purpose. Raphael persuasively argues, “[I]t seems possible to discern a causal relationship between the holiness of women’s relational acts in Auschwitz and God’s selfmanifestation or presence.”29 In a context in which Nazism sought to destroy human dignity, family and nonfamily relationships, and notions of purity through “excremental assault,” the refusal to allow one’s personhood or that of others to be diminished, the efforts to forge caring relationships with individuals sentenced to likely death, and the attempt to maintain a psychological and physical sense of cleanliness are all incredibly courageous acts of resistance, Raphael asserts. Her notion of divine presence both depends on and also grounds human acts of mutual care. She writes, “In Auschwitz, the revelation of the human(e) as presence to the other was entirely dependent upon the real presence of God as that to which the human other was agonizingly transparent. For the same reasons, the presence of God was entirely dependent on our showing ourselves to have been human(e).”30 Raphael offers that activities carried out to maintain a semblance of normalcy or to sustain one’s personhood may be interpreted

Jewish and African American Theology

387

as ways to maintain the image of God among persons and to conjure divine presence. In these actions, they manifested their own full humanity and that of the Other; they helped make manifest the very presence of God. Human acts of love and resistance to despair and dehumanization draw forth divine presence and, in the process, help mend or restore the world and God.

Divine power and human agency in liberation Several directions emerge from an exploration of African American and Jewish theological dialogue on the issue of belief in God in the face of horrendous evil. From Cone and Fackenheim, it is clear that suffering and evil must be addressed directly and in concrete, particular terms. From Hopkins, it is evident that a shift away from Christocentrism can create space for vibrant theologies, such as his notion of the Spirit, and thus perhaps productive encounters with non-Christian religions such as Judaism. Hopkins’s move toward the Spirt of Total Liberation in Us dovetails with Raphael’s turn away from patriarchal theologies of power and presence and toward Shekhinah. The theologies of Hopkins and Raphael, which tap into and renew resources already within the Jewish and Christian traditions, are very similar. In response to suffering and evil, divine goodness is asserted, while divine power and presence are reformulated as active, immanent, and, in some ways, dependent on human activity. No matter what theological and ethical perspective one has, the realities of suffering and evil remain. However, by understanding divine power as persuasive, subtle, and manifested most significantly in human acts of creativity, love, and resistance, we may be led to fight against the oppression and despair. In the end such a struggle may also be understood as positively fighting for peace, justice, and redemption in solidarity with God and with each other.

Notes 1 2

Though Shoah (destruction) is the preferred term for many Jews, the Jewish theologians examined in this essay use the term Holocaust, so I do here also. There has been a great deal of scholarship on black–Jewish relations, but very little on black–Jewish theological dialogue, the focus of this essay. By this I mean that there has been minimal work done by African American theologians on Jewish theology, Jewish theologians on black theology, or third parties on the encounter between the two realms of theologies. Interestingly, to my knowledge, much of the work that does exist in this area has been carried out by scholars who are neither black nor Jewish. Along these lines, see Howard Burkle, God, Suffering, & Belief (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1977); David O. Woodyard, “Theology after the Holocaust and Slavery: Emil L. Fackenheim and James H. Cone,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 56, no 1–2 (2002): 220–41; Kurt Buhring, Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Christopher Taylor Spotts, “Rediscovering Sabbath: Hebrew Social Thought And Its Contribution To Black Theology’s Vision For America” (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, Milwaukee, 2013).

388 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Handbook of African American Theology By classical theology I mean a view of God as all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing and that emphasizes divine transcendence more than immanence. The primary works drawn from in this section of the essay include James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 20th anniv. edn. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), James Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. edn. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York: NYU Press, 1970), and Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World, rev. edn. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 5; Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken, 1978), xi. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 5. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 31. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 38, 110, 114–18. Ibid., 81. Cone, God of the Oppressed, xvii–xviii, 159–63. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 138–9; Emil Fackenheim, What is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 283–4. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 29–30. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, xlvi, 138. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 9–18. Ibid., 84. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 253–6, 300, 309–10. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 69–73. William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). Anthony B. Pinn, Why Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995). Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism. 2nd edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003). Dwight N. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000). Ibid., 239. Ibid. Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, 55. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 101.

Select bibliography Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. 20th anniv. edn. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990. ——. God of the Oppressed. Rev. edn. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997.

Jewish and African American Theology

389

Fackenheim, Emil L. God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections. New York: NYU Press, 1970. ——. To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought. Rev. edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hopkins, Dwight N. Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000. Raphael, Melissa. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust. London: Routledge, 2003.

29

Black Theology and the Care of the Soul, Mind, and Body: Reading African American Theology from a Black British Perspective Delroy Hall

Introduction There are black people of the African diaspora who are concerned about the life and plight of black people in the West. In this chapter, there will be reflections on the origins of black theology, a brief psychological examination of the transatlantic slave trade, and the cost experienced by being severed from one’s place of birth, the impact on one’s being, and identity. In addition, some consideration will be given to the use of violence as a form of social control and its devastation on black humanity. What is often forgotten is that African Caribbeans in the United Kingdom have historical roots in the slave trade. Thus, there are strong connections with the African American experience. In more recent times, black Christian voices emerged within the UK context, from the Windrush epoch, vying for a black theological anthropology, but making a plea to be included in the transatlantic dialogue with their American and Caribbean siblings. In the final analysis there is an impassioned appeal that black theology must not clamour for admittance and acceptance into the white academy, as black theology by its nature is a theology primarily for marginalized peoples as well as offering freedom for the worried well, powerful and the rich.

The origins of black theology Arguably the genesis of contemporary black theology may be traced to Howard Thurman’s classic text Jesus and the Disinherited. Here, Thurman argues that the good news of Jesus appeared to be the religion of liberation for people “whose backs were against the wall”.1 The consolidated work of black theology began with James Cone, who, in observing black life in white America, asked the question, “What does God have to say about the suffering of black people?” Using a Marxist paradigm and interrogating the Black Power movement, Cone devised a set of principles that gave

392

Handbook of African American Theology

rise to black theology. Although originally understood as a political theology, I contend, by implication, that black theology is also a pastoral theology. By pastoral theology, I mean a theology that is concerned with the care and cure of souls. In a nutshell, pastoral theology is the integration of psychology and theology. However, this is more nuanced than simply applying psychology in a random manner to the world of theology. In Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls, Lee Butler makes a strong case that mainstream psychology panders to the notion of white supremacy and black inferiority. Psychology that is relevant for black people is emphasized by Butler: “Black (African) psychology is a field dedicated to the analysis of the systems of oppression that inhibit black life for the sole purpose of liberating African people.”2 From another perspective, Stewart Hiltner, considered the founding father of pastoral theology, defined it as “a shepherding dimension to the total aspect of church life and ministry followed by some theological reflections.”3 In contrast to this mainstream understanding, Ali Watkins, African American female pastoral theologian, insists that a pastoral theology taking into consideration the cultural and historical context of African American is necessary. Carroll Watkins Ali writes of “theological reflection on the cultural context as relevant for strategic pastoral caregiving in the context of ministry.”4 A further perspective of this brand of pastoral theology is that at “its heart is an interpretive dialectic between theological anthropology and psychology that results in a definitive understanding of humanity.”5 Cone’s observation was that the so-called “problem” was that black people simply desired to be treated as equal to their white counterparts. In reality, the experience of black people in the United States is illustrated in the words of psychologist William James, who likened the experience of being ignored to being “cut dead.” Here is his description: No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met “cut us dead,” and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily torture would be a relief.6

This stark definition highlights the plight of black humanity in America of being a disposable nonentity, similar to Dubois’s earlier examination of the color line being a problem in America.7 The plight of the African Americans links them to their oftenforgotten siblings in the Caribbean and in the United Kingdom, and even more so now in different parts of Europe.

Detachment from home: black humanity in the West The African diaspora has its roots in the days of the violence in the transatlantic slave trade. However, an alternative argument exists where Ivan Van Sertima makes the

Care of the Soul, Mind, and Body

393

claim, supported by archaeological and historical evidence, that there was an African presence in America and other parts of the world from around 1310.8 Reflecting on the African diaspora inhabiting the landmasses of the West draws attention to the uniqueness of the former enslaved Africans. One of the aspects that unites the disparate groups of Africans is the Middle Passage; the horrendous journey that transported millions of enslaved Africans to lands of terror. This violent removal from one’s land cannot be taken lightly. What is often overlooked is the psychological, emotional, spiritual, and existential effect on the enslaved as they were forcibly removed from their homeland. This wrenching from the land has not been given much thought. Psychologists, psychotherapists, and the like are acutely aware of the potential devastation of the beginnings of a child’s life if they are rejected by or do not bond well with their mothers or are continually rejected by their significant other. It has many effects including a low sense of self, low mood, a distorted view of the world, and the development of poor relationships.9 If measures are not quickly established the relationship between mother and child is set to be difficult with complications later in life. This important bonding is conceptualized as attachment theory where “attachment is a deep and enduring emotional bond that connects one person to another across time and space.” The chief proponent of attachment theory was psychiatrist John Bowlby, who, while studying the relationship between mother and child, observed distress in children when separated from their mother. He later defined attachment as a “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.”10 One wonders whether, when there is a violent detachment from the land of one’s origin, it evokes significant negative effect on the captured and dispersed with potential debilitating effects, partially unknown and totally unknown with some lingering consequences on the lives of the former enslaved progenitors. Howard Thurman offers some insight into the devastation of such removal from one’s homeland: Unlike the American Indian, the African slave was uprooted from his land, his territory, and brought forcibly several thousand miles away to another land completely alien to his spirit and his gods. All ties that gave him a sense of belonging, of counting, of being a person nourished by a community of persons were abruptly severed, lacerated, torn asunder. Bodies that were emotionally bleeding hulks were set down in the new world of the Americas. Initially he had no standing, even of that of an outsider. In terms of his access to the sources of nourishment for community, initially he had none. No. Not even the status of a human being. It is no accident that the New Testament Greek word for slave is soma, which means body, thing.11

Thurman’s 129-word description is chillingly cold as the enslaved African is reduced to a “thing.” His comment is without any reference to the works and analysis of psychology which would add further insight into the human cost of violent severance from one’s homeland. Furthermore, severance from Africa was not from lands the enslaved had only recently inhabited. They had occupied their lands for many centuries. The severance from their homeland was one thing, but the violence they encountered was unprecedented.

394

Handbook of African American Theology

The use of violence as a form of social control and its impact on black humanity Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson refers to violence being used as a form of social control and the whole experience of treatment as natal alienation.12 These are not simply fancy words to describe an abstract human phenomenon, but at the end of these descriptions lie the lives of millions of human beings whose lives, culture, history and language have been ravaged. It was evident how violence was used as a regular measure on the plantations to keep the enslaved in check. Teresa L. Amott and Julie A. Matthaei in Race, Gender, and Work: A Multi-cultural Economic History of Women in the United States demonstrate how violence was used as a painful deterrent. They emphasise that “Slavery was built on coercion and violence. Slave owners continually resorted to physical intimidation and punishment to keep slaves from rebelling and slaves continually resisted enslavement.”13 Trevor Burnard’s thinking on the complicated sexual antics of the eighteenth century slavemaster also deserves serious consideration. He writes: The psychological damage suffered by the slaves living under traumatising conditions and in a radically unstable society was especially apparent in slaves’ sexual interactions. The tyranny that slaveholders exercised over their slaves, the constant dehumanising that slaves experienced under that tyranny, and the extreme instability and violence that marked plantation slavery brutalised slaves. Subjected to constant violence themselves, they were quick to resort to violence against each other. The result was that slaves found it difficult to maintain order in their own communities, especially since they emulated their masters in giving little respect to the integrity of established slave relationships.14

The living reality of enslavement could not have been imagined in the minds of the enslaved. This unexpected treatment led to a severe relationship breakdown which made the forming of a stable community impossible, and thus reinforced the notion of “Who am I and where do I belong?” While this chapter has focused its attention on the impact of enslavement on the soils of America and the Caribbean, it must not be forgotten, although it often is, that the African diaspora found in the UK shares in the communal history of the horrors of the Middle Passage, severance from African homeland, dehumanization and the employment of violence on the black body and psyche. Thus, the ties that bind one to one’s original culture, history, language and so forth are further weakened as many arrived, by invitation of the then Conservative government, to rebuild Britain after World War II. The Windrush epoch saw 492 Caribbeans, mainly Jamaicans, arrive in the UK, full of vigour and zeal to help rebuild the motherland and to be fully accepted into British life and culture.15 What began with great expectation and a desire to integrate was met, by and large, with great hostility.

Care of the Soul, Mind, and Body

395

A UK black theological anthropological identity Conversations about black identity have been ongoing for some time with a conference being held in 1945 by the Pan-African movement.16 This conference had many great names in attendance but was, it seems, not worthy of much historical acknowledgment as they conducted their conference in the shadow of the decline of the British Empire. However, on arrival and unbeknown to them and the British population, the Windrush generation was about to cause an unexpected social and religious stir in the UK. This upheaval is reflected upon by Walter Hollenweger’s observations as he writes in Roswith Gerloff ’s classic text A Plea for Black British Theologies: “Christians in Britain prayed for many years for revival and when it came they did not recognise it because it was black. Nevertheless, it produced a religious, social and intellectual vitality which is astonishing.”17

Empire Windrush The now infamous invitation, “Come to Sunny Britain” is humorously quoted by the Caribbean migrants as they tell their stories of enticement to come to the United Kingdom. Further myths were shattered when they arrived in Britain and realized that the streets were not paved with gold as they had been indoctrinated in the Caribbean. Here were migrants invited into the UK to help rebuild a land where their ancestors were instrumental in developing the nation, via a catastrophic loss of life on the many plantations in the Americas. This land, the UK, had been decimated by white men who were at odds with each other and cheap labor was needed to rebuild the motherland. Many Caribbeans came, not realizing they had been somewhat deluded. The formation of a new identity in the Caribbean was being created and for many persons was disrupted when they took up the offer of migrating to the United Kingdom. Arriving as integrationists, they soon saw that things were not as they had been told.18 Added to the illusion of Mother England, the disruption of the formation of a new identity within the Caribbean became more complex as the new arrivals to the UK were now twice removed from Africa and now relocated to another part of an alien West. This detachment and its consequence have slipped under the radar of African Caribbean consciousness and existence in the UK. Furthermore, this detachment was further exacerbated as they arrived in Britain, a land that was not theirs. Arrival in the UK for Caribbeans, by invitation, guaranteed full British rights, as they were still under British colonial rule and therefore were British subjects. In reality, this was not so. The recent UK public outcry in April 2018 by politicians and many of the Windrush epoch and their descendants, some of whom were deported back to Jamaica, proves just how unexpectedly vulnerable the colonial children were on arrival in the UK.19 The African Caribbean people were literally a group of “landless people.” Historian of black religion Charles Long conceptualized this notion of landless people as belonging to African American people “where the image of Africa as it appears in black religion is unique, for the black people in America are a landless people.”20 Coupled with Long’s treatise is the contention of the late African American historian John Henrik Clarke that

396

Handbook of African American Theology

black people must understand that Western civilization was not created with them in mind.21 This notion has not been fully explored. One of the few voices reflecting on this matter comes from Ghanaian pastoral theologian Emmanuel Lartey who says that “The effects of Black existence in Britain upon Black people have yet to be fully worked out.” One discipline that can be used to examine black life in the UK is psychotherapy, by using the over-representation of mental illness amongst African Caribbeans as important data to develop an understanding of the effects of living in the UK on the mental health and wellbeing of that particular migrant population. One wonders whether being twice removed from their African cultural homeland and subsequent generations being born in a land not designed for them creates an often unspoken, but ongoing, experience of unease and tension. For example, many Caribbeans in the United Kingdom have little regard for Africa and many are removed from the Caribbean, yet they do not feel at home in England. Worse still, if they go to the Caribbean, they are regarded as foreigners and, in the United Kingdom context, their colour makes them stand out and not blend in with the host population. Despite the welcome and the societal coldness felt by many, there were some black people who began to write about the pain of their experience in the UK.

Emerging black voices within the UK With a significant lapse of time outside and inside the church setting, one begins to hear black Christians’ voices reflecting theologically on their experience of being black and living in the UK. One of the earliest voices was Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956). Selvon does not reflect theologically on life for black people in Britain, but his work contains religious themes. For example, he refers to people meeting on Sundays to gain strength and encouragement from each other.22 Later, Venetia Newall records the Caribbean migratory experience as one of “withdrawal and cultural retention.”23 In 1976, the Church of England commissioned a study to examine why they had lost so many of their Anglican adherents when they arrived in the UK despite having letters of endorsement that they were bona fide members of the Church of England. The church failed to see Caribbean Christians as their brothers and sisters, and in doing so failed to capture their gifts and contributions that would have enriched the life of the church. The study displayed how “Black people’s presence evoked a sense of ‘disease’ within British society, but it highlighted fissures existing prior to Caribbean migration.” These were some of the further findings: Black people cannot allow White society to dictate the terms of analysis of their situation in Britain, nor give the prescriptions. As Black people continue to adhere to White society for antidotes for their deliverance it continues to enhance their destruction, yet for effective change to occur the marginalised and the poor must make changes for themselves.24

The study did not advocate a segregationist approach for black Christians in the UK, but it recorded that “being a part of system where one is alienated is madness, and

Care of the Soul, Mind, and Body

397

attempting to join such a system and to bring about change from within when your humanity is ignored and not accepted, is double madness.”25 Ten years later, Anita Jackson interviewed five pastors from various denominations. One of the overriding themes from the publication was the great need for autonomy. This was exemplified by one of the pastors who said: “West Indians in England need to get off their backside and do something and stop expecting things to come into their lap.”26 Following Jackson’s publication, Ira Brooks, a New Testament Church of God pastor, reflecting on black life in Britain, became frustrated with his organization as he studied and discovered the depth and richness of African civilizations before the arrival of European missionaries. He challenged his own organization for their silence in the face of racism and its problem in the church while arguing for a “contextual theological that represented their views about God.”27 The early 1990s saw a proliferation of publications wrestling with the issue of racism, inclusion, and the Christian faith. Paul Grant and Raj Patel argued for black people to “take responsibility for their faith journey, their development and the creation of a theology for Black people by Black people.”28 However, the most concise publication arguing for and developing a black British theology was cultural critic and black theologian Robert Beckford’s Jesus is Dread. Building on a plethora of other authors, Beckford stressed the inherent inadequacy of Western theological models to capture the experiences of black Christians. Furthermore, he articulated the healing nature of the black church and black worship, writing: “Worshipping in a Black Majority Church kept me sane as a Black person of African Caribbean descent in Britain.”29 While Beckford opened the development of a black British theology in his seminal work, the most prolific writer on black British theology is, without doubt, Anthony Reddie. Reddie has used a variety of exercises, drama, and a rereading of the biblical text to teach and introduce ideas of black theology to black British adherents. For example, in Nobodies to Somebodies, Reddie introduces ideas from black and liberation theology to train a wide range of ministerial practitioners. In developing a black British theology, Reddie has valiantly attempted to articulate a black British theology encapsulating the Atlantic, but in doing so he has omitted an important voice in the dialogue. This omission is taken up by Delroy Reid-Salmon, who praises Reddie’s contribution, but offers the critique that currently a black British theology is an African American voice in a black British body and a “closer relationship with their Caribbean siblings would be more beneficial.”30 Thus, in three major African diasporic locations, all united by the horrors of enslavement and the Middle Passage, they are attempting to work out an understanding of themselves in their contexts, but seldom uniting in conversation.

The future for African American theology and black theology Is there a future for black theology for the black community? Alistair Kee seems to think not. He contends that when black theology first appeared it was radical and revolutionary, but it now has lost its way with the gap between wealthy educated blacks and poor blacks continuing to increase. While Kee’s analysis might have a

398

Handbook of African American Theology

measure of truth, it is fatal to allow the comments of one person to determine one’s destiny. The issues of oppression and liberation remain key factors in black people requiring freedom. In moving forward there are a few matters to take seriously. First, there must be a continual dialogue between other disciplines, while firmly committed to the Bible that sheds light on the human condition. Black people, despite the continual propagation of stereotypes and other forms of discrimination, are human beings created in the image of God. Second, black theology must take a firm grip in the shaping of identity. Third, the development of black theology must find a way to develop an encouraging and nurturing dialogue with adherents of continental Africa and their offspring elsewhere. Forth, black theology is not arguing for a separatist state of being, but it simply cannot afford to join with the white academy. Adherence to such powerful institutions inevitably ensures that such a potentially revolutionary theology loses its potency due to the policies and procedures that are laid down to govern what is taught and how it is taught. Black theology cannot expend precious energy on vying for acceptance and legitimization in white institutions that, due to fear, lack of understanding, and white dominance, will inevitably disempower it. Another reason for resisting acceptance within the academy is that there is simply too much blood in the water. Too many lives of the enslaved African ancestors have been lost not only in laboring to provide sugar, tobacco, and cotton, but millions of lives were cut short and “cut dead.” Not only was there the loss of physical life, there was the immense loss of human potential. The continual loss of black human potential remains today with an increasing overrepresentation of black lives within the mental health system, the penal system, with the lack of employment and the ongoing lack of historical education about who black people are. Furthermore, given the plight of black people in the United States and the United Kingdom diaspora, black theology must not be a theology simply concerned with gaining recognition within the academy. There are too many existential issues that continue to threaten and wreak havoc on black life. In the United States of America, it would appear that black life has been under constant threat, control, assault and surveillance since the first black sole of the enslaved feet touched the soil of the Americas. Within the UK, the national move to sever itself from Europe, via Brexit, and the recent Windrush scandal are stark reminders that black people are still not readily welcomed here. In contrast, some have heralded the recent Royal Wedding in the UK and the high prominence of black people being so heavily featured during the ceremony as opening up a new day of racial inclusion for Britain. The wedding was only one day. Many black people in the UK still awoke the following morning wrestling with the issues of race, class, and power. Black theology must start from the grassroots primarily to conscientize black people to have full responsibility for their destiny. Finally, the biggest stronghold confronting black theology which it must fiercely grapple with, if it is going to have a robust future, is the entity of power. If black theology is going to remain true to the biblical text in addressing the notions of power there is paradigm within the scriptures than can be modelled. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7), Jesus gathered simple folk together as he expounded the principles of his Father’s kingdom and how to live on the earth. One must remember that such teachings

Care of the Soul, Mind, and Body

399

were explained under a cruel, violent, and oppressive Roman government.31 The point here is that a possible way of dealing with power and oppression is to educate and mobilize ordinary people. The end result of Jesus imparting life into these ordinary people was that “they turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6). Black theology was not conceptualized to turn the world upside down, but much can be accomplished if people are effectively equipped to live to their potential. There is still much more work for black theology to do. It is hard, blistering, and thankless work, and dreadfully painful. However, if it is to be a theology that brings life to people, both oppressed and oppressor alike, it must rethink and act how it will appeal to the masses of black people who call themselves Christians or people of faith.

Conclusion Since the days of James Cone and his conceptualization of a black theology of liberation, the world has shifted significantly. For example, in terms of technology we have evolved from the humble typewriter to the flexibility of electronic devices where dissertations and the like can be written quickly. The world in its various guises of class, race, ethnicities, sexual orientation, and power has changed too. Black theology, for the liberation of its people, if it is to remain a viable form of God-speak, must wrestle with the issues of its day. Chiefly, it must contend and give answers to race, ethnicity, class, gender, but most of all to power which influences most people. An African American theology cannot remain an insular form of theology limited to the shores of its land, but it must now lift up its head as “the fields are ripe for harvesting” (John 4:35). There are millions of displaced Africans throughout the world who need conscientizing in lifting up their heads to tackle the issues of life on their shores. Rather than extending the reach for acceptance within the academy, a better use of energy will be to enter a meaningful transatlantic dialogue as equals with their UK and Caribbean siblings. Including African voices in the dialogue is pivotal too, as issues of dominance are significantly changing for them also. United we are strong, but divided we place ourselves on the path of failure in such changing and unpredictable times.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Thurman, 1976, 7. Butler, 127–9. Hiltner, 20. Ali, 10. Butler, 127–9. James, i. 239. Du Bois, 1. Van Sertima, 142. Bowlby, 194. Ibid.

400 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Handbook of African American Theology Thurman, 1998, 281. Patterson, 7. Amott and Matthaei, 145. Burnard, 181–2. Hill, 1958, 19. Høgsbjerg. Hollenweger, ix. Hill, 1965, 150. BBC “windrush scandal.” Long, 26. John Henrik Clarke video documentary. Selvon, 135. Newall, 28–29. John, 7. Ibid., 17. Jackson, 58. Brooks, 38–51. Grant and Patel, 1. Beckford, 4–5. Reid-Salmon, 135. See Goldsworthy.

References Ali, Carroll A. Watkins, Survival and Liberation: Pastoral Theology in African American Context (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1999). Amott, Teresa L. and Matthaei, Julie A., Race, Gender, and Work: A Multi-cultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1996). BBC. “Windrush Scandal,” BBC News May 25, 2018, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/ c9vwmzw7n7lt/windrush-scandal (accessed May 28, 2018.) Beckford, Robert, Jesus is Dread: Black Theology and Black Culture in Britain (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1998). Bowlby, John, Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1. Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969). Brooks, Ira V., Another Gentleman to the Ministry (Birmingham: Compeer Press, 1986) Burnard, Trevor, “The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer.” In M.D. Smith, ed., Sex and Sexuality in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Butler, Lee, Liberating Our Souls, Saving Our Souls (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006). Dubois, W.E.B. The Soul of Black Folks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). Garvey, Marcus, Marcus Garvey Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (California: University of California, 1987), 213. Goldsworthy, A., Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2016). Grant, Paul, and Patel, Raj, A Time to Speak: Perspectives of Black Christians in Britain (Birmingham: Racial Justice and Black Theology Working Group, 1990). Hill, C.S.H., Black and White in Harmony: The Drama of West Indians in the Big City, from a London Minister’s Notebook (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958).

Care of the Soul, Mind, and Body

401

——. How Colour Prejudiced is Britain? (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965). Hiltner, Stewart, Preface to Pastoral Theology (New York: Abingdon Press, 1958). Høgsbjerg, Christian, “Remembering the Fifth Pan-African Congress,” Leeds African Studies Bulletin 77 (Winter 2015/16): 119–39, http://lucas.leeds.ac.uk/article/ remembering-the-fifth-pan-african-congress-christian-hogsbjerg/ (accessed May 26, 2018.) Hollenweger, Walter J., “Foreword” to Gerloff, Roswith I.H., A Plea for British Black Theologies, Volume 1: The Black Church Movement in Britain in Its Transatlantic Cultural and Theological Interaction with Special Reference to the Pentecostal Oneness (Apostolic) and Sabbatarian Movements (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2010). Jackson, Anita, Catching Both Sides of the Wind: Conversations with Five Black Pastors (London: British Council of Churches, 1985). James, William, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (New York: Cosimo, 1890). John, Gus, The New Black Presence in Britain: A Christian Scrutiny (London: Community and Race Relations Unit of the British Council of Churches, 1976). John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk [video] (1996). Kee, Alistair, The Rise and Demise of Black Theology (London: Routledge, 2017). Lartey, Emmanuel, “After Stephen Lawrence,” Black Theology in Britain: A Journal of Contextual Praxis 3 (1999): 79–91. Long, Charles, “Perspectives for a Study of African American Religion in the United States.” In: Fulop, Timothy Earl and Raboteau, Albert J., eds., African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York, Routledge, 1997). Newall, Venetia, “Black Britain: The Jamaicans and their Folklore,” Folklore 106, no. 1 (1975). Patterson, O., Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Reddie, Anthony, Nobodies to Somebodies: A Practical Theology for Education and Liberation (Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2003). Reid-Salmon, Delroy, Book review of Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue, Anthony Reddie, in Black Theology: An International Journal 6 (1) (2008). Selvon, Sam, Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin Books, 1956). Thurman, Howard, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1976). ——, A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life edited by W. Fluker and C. Tumber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). Van Sertima, Ivan, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House, 1976).

30

African American Theology and Her Siblings in the Caribbean Diaspora: Toward a Theology of a Plurality of Praxis in the Black Atlantic World Delroy A. Reid-Salmon

Introduction This chapter examines the relationship between Caribbean diasporan theology and African American theology in the black Atlantic world.1 The steady and rapid increase of people of African descent primarily from continental Africa and the Caribbean to the United States of America is changing the nature and content of African American theology. This suggests African American theology consists of a variety of religious traditions. Given this reality, the current use of the term “African American” is problematic. It is both insular and hegemonic, not different from Euro-American theologies. This is not what African American theology wants to be, but is what it is, if it is not more inclusive. This essay considers the pluralistic character of African American theology. African American theology is a distinct intellectual discipline that interprets the meaning of God through the lens of the African American experience. Put differently, African American theology is the umbrella or framework for the study of religious and theological beliefs and practices of people of African descent in American society. The study encompasses Christian and non-Christian theologies, religious beliefs, and practices.2 In his interpretation of African American theology, Frederick Ware acknowledges that this theology includes faith traditions of the various people who constitute the African American population. He grounds it in African American experience and culture where it maintains its particularity and peculiarity. However, it is not the only theology that constitutes this intellectual discipline.3 Ware calls attention to the important distinction between African American theology and other forms of theology. He observes that these other theologies are African American theology, but not necessarily liberation theology, neither black nor womanist. According to Ware, black theology is about liberation from oppression caused by racism. Womanist theology emphasizes survival4 amidst issues as of racism, sexism, and classism.5 It is not clear whether Ware considers the religious traditions of people of African descent living in the United States who are not African Americans. His definition

404

Handbook of African American Theology

risks having an imperialistic orientation that could undermine claims of contextuality and inclusivity. The normative view of African American theology is the interpretation of the religious and theological experiences of people of African descent who were born in America, shaped by the experience of slavery and racism and defined by the culture and institutions that inform their identity and influenced their life. As this does not include the religious traditions of all the people of African descent in the United States,6 African American theology risks becoming an imperial and monolithic theology in a context of plurality of religions and distinct traditions within these religions. This blind spot is a serious weakness in African American theology. This chapter argues for a plurality of praxis in the quest for freedom and flourishing of black life in the USA. Freedom is the central tenet of African American theology in the black Atlantic world. The essay proposes engagement with African American theology through a post-colonial optic or transatlantic gaze. Caribbean diasporan theology presupposes that both traditions shape and inform each other. This mutual engagement of interwoven purpose is expressed through a relational and dialogical partnership in the study of God in the black Atlantic experience.7 This is an attempt to deconstruct and resist theological imperialism and construct a theology that understands the times and attends to burning issues within the broader black Atlantic world. It strives to answer questions within the wider context of the black Atlantic religious experience, such as the essential nature of African American theology and its relationship to other black theological proposals emanating from the black Atlantic world. African American theology should constitute the faith traditions—beliefs, practices, and contributions—of people who are not African Americans. Caribbean diasporan theology can provide an understanding of how Caribbean people, through their faith and religious practices, reconfigure, enhance and contribute to African American theology to make it a theology for and of the black Atlantic—a theology of praxis.

Plurality of praxis: a note Caribbean diasporan theology is the critical study of the religious traditions and experiences of Caribbean immigrants and their descendants in the USA. It is a constitutive element of African American theology. This theology is created within diasporan experience, is autonomous and distinctive, but is a mutually interrelated intellectual discipline. This theology informs, sustains, and fortifies against oppression and provides hope for the future. The process of creating and the nature of this theology broadens, deepens, and changes the character of African American theology to make it inclusive and pluralistic. Instead of limiting understanding of this theology, the African American religious tradition should incorporate the religious traditions of non-African Americans. In this way, it becomes and expresses a true plurality of praxis. Plurality of praxis asserts that African American theology consists of many Christian and non-Christian religious traditions. It redefines the discourse on the study of God in African American theology because of the evolution and changing character of black religion and culture in the USA. This change in character and practice makes it possible for African American theology to offer unique perspectives of theology. It asks questions

African American Theology and the Caribbean

405

about the cause of oppression, how to overcome oppression and create solidarity, freedom, and global identity. It seeks to dismantle and transcend forces that engender hegemony. Plurality of praxis, furthermore, gives freedom and opportunity to think about God in a new way. It invites participants to do theology in its own context and through the lens of their history and experiences. Plurality of praxis indicates alternative ways of studying about God and learning from those whose religious practice and thoughts are excluded from and are outside the academy. To see the importance of plurality of praxis is to see the larger context in which African American theology operates.

Common heritage Plurality of praxis becomes crucial as it includes a common heritage, incorporating ancestry, transatlantic history and experience, culture and destiny8 of African American and Caribbean people. Common heritage creates a vision of global black kinship, identity, and solidarity that transcends hegemonic ideology and discourses among African American or Caribbean people. This heritage is the material that constructs a global identity and solidarity to foster effective plurality of praxis. This unearths a crucial element of the common heritage. African American and Caribbean people have a common ancestry and are siblings. Noel Erskine’s Plantation Church argues that African Americans and Caribbean people shared a common ancestral heritage, identity and purpose of liberation from oppression and freedom. African Americans were first taken to the Caribbean and then to the United States, which resulted in the African diaspora. Erskine asserts that the black church tradition began in the Caribbean.9 “Plantation church” is a paradigm that describes this relationship between African American and Caribbean people. They had the same experiences and were subjected to the same conditions, although they were in different places in the world. Erskine concludes that it was still the same colonial experiences. Richard S. Dunn attests to this idea in his important book on plantation slavery in the Caribbean and North America, The Tales of Two Plantations. He examines the relationship between slavery in the Caribbean and United States of America. Dunn’s work speaks of the common experience of the oppression of black people due to slavery and colonialism. This experience is the umbilical cord that binds a people who were separated, fragmented, and had no hope of reunion. This underscores Erskine’s concern that to have a good understanding of both African American and Caribbean religions and theologies, it is important to know that their similarities and differences were due to socialization and the organization and operation of the plantations.10 Erskine brings to light the African roots of Caribbean Christianity. At issue are the Caribbean origins of African American theology and the common roots of both. He highlights the religious beliefs and practices of both religious traditions, demonstrating that African American theology and Caribbean theology are African-derived, bridging the gap between African American theology and Caribbean theology. In doing so, Erskine engenders a plurality of religious praxis. This understanding goes beyond accommodation and assimilation, prevalent where Caribbean people became members of African American churches. They became members of these churches for various reasons but they had to “fit in” or stay on the

406

Handbook of African American Theology

fringes. Their cultures are not components of the dominant culture. This suppression of culture impoverishes African American theology and makes it necessary for a plurality of praxis that minimizes the imperialism of African American theology. The common heritage between African American theology and Caribbean diasporan theology reveals they are part of a cause larger and beyond themselves. This demonstrates the plurality of praxis in African American theology. In his classic book Emancipation Still Comin’ Kortright Davis contends that Caribbean people and African Americans have one common story. Both are searching for the meaning of personhood, have a common experience of slavery and oppression, and desire the fullness of life. He believes religion is a central aspect of the black story. Davis is convinced that both have a common faith that affirms the belief in God as their hope. Davis strongly suggests that one way to know each other’s story is an intentional effort to learn the other’s history and be involved in cultural exchange.11 Michelle Stephens’s remarkable account of the formation of Black Atlantic identity Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1942 argues for a globalized Black Atlantic identity.12 She is convinced this identity transcends both African American and Caribbean ethnic nationalism. In an original and creative study, she integrates the work of Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and C.L.R. James. She roots the thoughts of these Caribbean intellectuals in the transatlantic experience of slavery, colonialism, and migration in dialogue with African American intellectual thought to forge this globalized identity.13 Stephens explains that the works of Garvey and McKay14 constitute the essence of a global black identity. That of C.L.R. James along with aspects of McKay’s are the embodiment of the identity.15 This globalized black identity is important to African American theology because it is inherent in Caribbean intellectual thought and life and the struggle for freedom. It attests that black struggle against oppression and for freedom is not local but transnational. Stephens concludes that African Americans and Caribbean diasporan people are one in their common identity. For Stephens, a globalized identity is central to black life. The identity represents a conceptual framework for doing theology while facing oppression, suffering and injustice. More important, it offers a new theology.16 Thus, African American theology is not monolithic nor ethno-nationalistic, but inclusive and pluralistic. This interpretation of identity is a negation of ethno-nationalism, an implicit indictment of those who refused to accept plurality inherent in African American theology. Plurality of praxis coalesces black identity into unitary reality for the interpretation of the ideas and religious experiences of people of African descent in the USA. The creativity in this practice engenders solidarity, forges relationships, and transforms identities. But there is another way of plurality of praxis.

Contributions Much overlooked and absent from religious and theological discourses is the contribution of the Caribbean diasporan church to American Christianity, especially

African American Theology and the Caribbean

407

African American theology. This contribution is a rich resource for theological study. Rooted in faith and shaped by their history, experience, and culture, Caribbean people established their own churches and offered services of ministry in their communities upon migrating to the USA. Since this is not a history of the Caribbean diasporan church, the study highlights one example of the contribution of Caribbean diasporan theology to African American theology. Ethelred Brown made an invaluable contribution to African American theology. Brown was Jamaican, founder of the first known black Unitarian church in Harlem and the first Caribbean diasporan church in New York City, the Harlem Unitarian Church.17 He is recognized as a founder of black humanism in the Unites States of America. Juan M. Floyd-Thomas attests to Brown’s pioneering work; he traces the origins of black humanism, of the relationship between religion, race, and class, through the thought and work of Brown. Although scholars have not paid much attention to Brown’s thought, Floyd-Thomas claims it is a resource for historical, religious, and theological studies. Brown’s thought and work reveal the forces and factors that influenced and shaped them, indicating that his was part of a much larger cause.18 While making these insightful observations, Floyd-Thomas made a serious omission. It is an open issue the difference it would make if he had considered Brown’s work through the framework of his Caribbean heritage rather than as an African American. Despite this omission, he interprets Brown as operating within a Pan-Caribbean consciousness.19 This does not fully explain the reason for the omission except that it was a developing ideology. There were also changes in the character of the black community as well as persistent oppression, and the difficulty to overcome it.20 In his seminal study on Brown,21 Mark Morrison-Reed identifies Brown as a pioneer in integrating this church and the larger society. Though of great significance, MorrisonReed, like Floyd-Thomas, failed to acknowledge the Caribbean heritage and constituency of Brown’s church.22 Caribbean people constituted both constituency and membership of the church. Foremost among them were W.A. Domingo of Jamaica, Richard B. Moore of Barbados, and Frank Crosswith of the US Virgin Islands. With Floyd-Thomas’s, Morrison-Reed’s work depicts the meaning of Brown’s life and work. They portray Brown as making an invaluable contribution to African American theology, addressing ills black people faced in American society. For example, he confronted the sin of segregation when he established the first black Unitarian church in the USA. It is believed the establishing of this church began the desegregation of the denomination and, indirectly, the larger society.23 Equally significant, it began theological discourse on racism. Brown’s contribution to African American theology is central. It illustrates one way theology was done, and how such theology was applied to change society and reconfigured theology discourse. The contribution of Caribbean diasporan theology to African American theology can also be seen in the religious and theological thought and work of Marcus Garvey. Much has been made of Garvey but not his contribution to African American theology. His vast, original, and constructive theological thought is an important resource for theology.24 It represents a salient feature of American theology and a major departure from Euro-American theology. Besides Henry McNeil Turner, Garvey is credited as the

408

Handbook of African American Theology

first person to imagine and articulate God as black. By claiming God is black, Garvey is not speaking analogically, but of metamorphic blackness. God is not a physical being but Spirit. For Garvey, God is Universal Intelligence.25 Just as God is not ontologically black, God also is not ontologically white. Yet, it is acceptable to imagine and portray God as white. Garvey argued the black person has a right to imagine God as black. Garvey’s theology goes deeper and beyond the aesthetic nature of God being black. He is not using this idea of God to advance political ideology or for religious justification of his faith. Instead, he is declaring the inestimable value of every black person. By asserting the dogmatic claim that God is black, it indicates the solidarity of God with black people and subverts the hegemonic myth of white supremacy. Imagining God in such racial context leaves one with no viable option but to think of God through the lens of one’s social existence and history. Through the theology of Garvey, it is possible to have ways of thinking about God other than in Western epistemology. Garvey interprets that it is correct to think about God through the lens of the black experience. Garvey’s theology reconfigures the identity of God. He deconstructs the Euro-centric understanding of God to initiate decolonizing theology.26 There are other religious and theological contributions to African American theology.27 But the works of Brown and Garvey are precursors to African American theology—black, humanist, and womanist—and other kinds of theology. These are not just contributions to African American theology, they describe the nature of this theology. They reveal that African American theology is not fixed but open, not static but dynamic, not final but evolving. The open, dynamic, and evolutionary character of this theology is ideally expressed as plurality of praxis.

Alliances The discussion so far identifies two dimensions of Caribbean diasporan theology that constitute African American theology. It is appropriate to consider a third element. The plurality of praxis involves the building of alliances between the Caribbean diaspora and African Americans. In her important work Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930, Irma Watkins-Owens provides a detailed account of such alliances.28 The study focuses on the heterogeneity in the black community. She explores the diverse origins and dimensions of the African American community as an integral element in the formation of the African American community.29 These interrelated practices delineate how plurality of praxis defines African American theology. They also speak to a broader understanding of God that can be described in three important ways: religious, political, and intellectual.

Religious alliance: Church and society As these alliances provide the opportunity for plurality of praxis, they are not practices of convenience but declarations of faith. Caribbean leaders forged alliances with African Americans through their churches and civic organizations to address pastoral, religious, social, cultural, and political challenges facing both communities. As Watkins-Owens

African American Theology and the Caribbean

409

notes, the African American church was the primary means through which leaders of the Caribbean community gained entrance to American public life. For example, Reverend Charles Douglas, a Kittitian, established and pastored the first Moravian church in Harlem. He was actively involved in the struggle against racism.30 They helped in significant ways to address the religious, social, and political issues the black community faced. They linked both African American and Caribbean communities and assimilated the new residents into the larger society. The alliances also helped to support financial and economic ventures. They provided financial assistance and individual loans to pay rent and mortgages, and to establish businesses. The Harlem Community Church, led by pastor Wesley S. Holder from Guyana, became a member of the West Indian Trading and Development Company. Holder established businesses and, along with other pastors, promoted economic development and entrepreneurialism among members of his congregation and the larger community.31 The church was practicing a theology of incarnation, making faith real and concrete. This was a marked shift toward the belief and practice that God works not only within and through the religious arena but also in the public. A significant theological development began to emerge. God is understood as fully present and active, working in nonreligious organizations reflecting God’s sovereignty over all life. This signifies a deep understanding of the relationship between religion and society. This is not to spiritualize the material nor politicize the religious. God is present in both arenas of life. To further explain the alliance between African American and Caribbean people as plurality of praxis, it is worth considering the political alliance.

Political alliance: Church and politics The alliances are not defined according to a false dichotomy of secular and sacred but the total existence of life. A major criticism of the church is its noninvolvement in social and political life in society, or the separation of the sacred from the secular. Black people cannot afford such luxury. The social order is designed to work against their welfare. Political alliances were not forming political parties nor engaging in partisan politics but were linking religious and theological thought to political movements. Even if those who do so are not religious, if it serves the cause of justice, freedom, and dignity—the liberation of the oppressed—it is considered a theological act. Perhaps the most distinctive example of the political alliance between African Americans and Caribbean immigrants is the work of the influential and brilliant Hubert Harrison.32 Harrison, born in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, was extraordinarily complex and controversial. Calling attention to Harrison is important as historians and theologians have largely ignored his work, which reveals how African Americans and the Caribbean diaspora worked together to address common problems. It illustrates the dynamic relationship between religion and politics to construct the meaning of freedom in an unjust and oppressive society. Harrison was popular within the black community but not among its leadership. Black leadership did not accept him as a leader because he was outspoken.33 He challenged the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington, resulting in the loss of his job at the New York Post Office. The Socialist party employed him and he

410

Handbook of African American Theology

became their chief spokesperson on race and workers’ rights. His great insight led him to identify race and class as social, political, and structural problems, locating them in the social and political system.34 Racism and classism are social constructions, problems humans created and, thus, solvable. Harrison’s perspective brought fresh and new insight to the race problem and was credited for this approach to racial supremacy. He advanced the idea that the right of white workers is not the same as that of black workers,35 an important distinction about civil rights in a racist society. Black and white people are equal, but the denying the latter their civil rights is not the same as denying the former theirs. How could it be when the society is designed on white supremacy? As important as creating political alliance was, it was more than an individual endeavor. The Caribbean intelligentsia forged an alliance with African Americans to change the society for the better. They formed alliances with African American organizations such as the National Association for Colored People (NAACP), the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), and many others to address racial discrimination, economic exploitation, and political oppression. The alliance, however, does not mean there were not major ideological differences among Caribbean intellectuals and between them and African Americans. There were bitter conflicts between Ethelred Brown, Cyril Brigs, W.A. Domingo,36 and Marcus Garvey. Brown and Brigs believed in an integrationist approach to racism while Domingo and Garvey upheld a nationalistic approach. Conflict also existed between African Americans and Caribbean people as portrayed in Claude McKay’s Home Harlem. African Americans regarded McKay’s portrayal and depiction of Harlem as an affront to them. This animosity continued between Garvey and Dubois. Garvey criticized Dubois and his organization, NAACP, as elitist. In return, Dubois laid personal attacks on Garvey and rejected his “Back to Africa” ideology and plan.37 Despite their differences, both groups worked together through a common framework for the common good of the black community by forging alliances. These alliances reveal that no one has a monopoly on truth. They were engaged in a cause bigger and beyond themselves.

Intellectual alliance: The politics of religion The alliance between African Americans and Caribbean immigrants indicates not only the relationship between the church and society and religion and politics, but consists of the related claim of the politics of religion. The politics of religion concerns the power of religion to transform society. In this instance, both approaches were working together for the same purpose. The political was not used as means to an end and neither was religion used to legitimize the political. The issues they addressed were not necessarily religious, but were interpreted through the lens of faith.38 Again, mention must be made of Egbert Ethelred Brown. Tammy Brown gives attention to the work of Brown in City Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York City, acknowledging the role he played in shaping African American theology as a pastor and public intellectual. He spoke at various political forums, was on the speaking circuit for the Socialist Party in New York City, and unsuccessfully ran for national (1928), state (1929), and municipal office (1930).

African American Theology and the Caribbean

411

Apart from his involvement in elected politics, Brown exemplified the intellectual alliance between Caribbean diasporan religious thinkers and African American theologians by establishing a public forum at his church.39 He held meetings to address political issues and illustrated this in one of his sermons, “If Jesus Comes to Harlem, What Would He Denounce?”40 In this sermon, Brown points out that Jesus was erroneously portrayed as spineless and passive. As a correction, Brown declares that Jesus is courageous and strong.41 Jesus confronts unjust powers and denounces evil, exemplified in overthrowing and casting out hustlers in the Jewish temple. Conversely, it should be made clear that whereas political issues were generally pursued as end in themselves, Brown understands pursing them for the good of others. At the same time, Brown’s approach to religion is correctly criticized as colonial and Eurocentric. But to see the greater importance of his thought, attention must given to the larger context of his work. Despite this criticism, it is a fact that Caribbean intellectuals allied with African Americans to address a variety of political, national, and international issues, ranging from racism, workers’ rights, and civil rights, to independence, freedom, and justice. Brown interpreted these issues theologically, representing a nascent theology of liberation. He shows the deep connection between religion and the immediate existential condition of human life. The intellectual alliance bridges the gap between the religious and the secular to produce new ideas about God. It demonstrates that local challenges were part of a much larger problem. This alliance suggests issues of liberation—justice, freedom, equality—were not merely materialist or humanistic but were ultimate concerns. Truth resides not only in the religious but in the non-religious as well. African American intellectuals like W.E.B. Dubois affirm the role of and welcomed the alliance with Caribbean intellectuals. Referring to the biblical remark about Ethiopia (Psalm 68:31), Dubois interprets it to mean the Caribbean intelligentsia: “It is not beyond possibility that this new Ethiopia of the Isle shall yet stretch hands of helpfulness to the 12 million black men [people] of America.”42 The role of the Caribbean intelligentsia in the alliance between African Americans and Caribbean people is crucial to African American theology. It suggests an understanding of Caribbean intellectuals not as messiahs but as playing an emancipatory role in the African American community. The contextual interpretation of Ethiopia to mean the Caribbean intelligentsia integrates and enriches the nature and contents of African American theology. It extends the scope of this theology beyond the limitations of ethnic nationalism and local practice to a broader and larger context that is global and plural. Whatever forms these alliances take, they afforded the African American and the people of the Caribbean diaspora the space to reason, strategize, and collaborate.43 It was a reminder of their duty to face the challenges of living in a racist and oppressive society.44 The alliances were not social movements or networks but means of carrying out faith, bearing witness to God’s liberating purpose, and embodying a theology of transformation and liberation. The alliances were not an isolated practice but highlighted the role and power of ideas to transform society. They signified a deeper issue. Whereas the ideas of the majority of intellectuals were not religious, Ethelred Brown offers a theological interpretation of the various issues he addressed, a

412

Handbook of African American Theology

demonstration of the politics of religion. As an intellectual discipline, Caribbean diasporan theology must take its place in African American theology.

Conclusion It is hoped this essay demonstrates a way forward for African American theology. Caribbean diasporan theology is an under-explored tradition of African American theology. The two theologies have a common heritage, make contributions to, and share mutual relationships with civic and political organizations. Caribbean diasporan theology is a constitutive element of African American theology. The way forward is not to reinvent but to continue what began years ago. One place to begin is to acknowledge the past and to root future endeavors in that past. Rooted in the work and practices of previous generations, African American theology should include and address issues such as migration, reparation, and globalization, understanding it is not “us” versus “them,” but that all of us are in the same boat, navigating uncharted waters toward one destiny—the fullness of life.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

The studies of the Black Atlantic Tradition I have in mind are: Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2009: Colonialism, Democracy and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); James H. Sweet, Domingo Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Frederick L. Ware, African American Theology: An Introduction (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 3–4. Ibid., 3. For a study on the theology of non-Christian religion and that liberation is not limited to Christian religion, see Noel Leo Erskine’s ground breaking study, From Garvey to Marley: Rasta Theology (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2005). It is important to note that womanist theology does not claim to be a liberation theology but a theology of survival. See Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (New York: Orbis Books, 1993). Ware, African American Theology, 4. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Crown Publishing, 2016), 124–5. The following works provide a general introduction to this area of study consisting of Christian and non-Christian religions traditions. See Anthony Reddie, Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Black Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Elaine Bauer and Paul Thompson, Jamaican: Hands Across the Atlantic (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006); For a masterly interdisciplinary account of this subject, Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

African American Theology and the Caribbean 8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

413

A master study on this issue is Christine Chivallon, The Black Diaspora in the Americas: Experience and Theories out of the Caribbean (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2011); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas; Restoring the Links (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006). Noel Erskine, Plantation Church: How African American Religion was Born in Caribbean Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–94. Erskine, Plantation Church, 157–65. Kortright Davis, Emancipation Still Comin’: Exploration in Caribbean Emancipatory Theology (New York: Orbis Books, 1990), 117–29; for further exploration of this subject, see Pedrito Maynard-Reid, Diverse Worship; African-American, Caribbean & Hispanic Perspective (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 1–137; Delroy A. Reid-Salmon, “Out of Every Tribe and Nation,” in Postcolonial Black British Theology: New Texture and New Themes, ed. Michael N. Jagessar and Anthony G. Reddie (Peterborough: Epworth, 2007),73–101. Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). This study provides the normative definition of this identity. The major weakness in the definition of the idea is Gilroy’s failure to take into account the role of religion in the formation of a Black Atlantic identity. Unfortunately, he totally omitted religion from his study. For other perspectives on this subject, see Deborah A. Thomas, Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004); Michelle M. Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 6–9. Michelle Stephens, Black Empire, 73–165. Ibid., 167–240. Ibid., 31; 241–81. The church had a series of name change. It was first named Harlem Community Church, then Hubert Harrison memorial Church, in honor of Harrison who greatly influenced Ethelred Brown, and finally the Harlem Unitarian Church. It is not clear why Brown made these changes. It is assumed, however, to reflect what the church means and was probably an identity crisis. Was this about Brown or about the church? Juan M. Floyd-Thomas, The Origins of Black Humanism in America: The Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Unitarian Church (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),1–91. Ibid., 128–54. Ibid., 154. Mark D. Morrison-Reed, Black Pioneer in a White Denomination (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books),1994. Tammy L. Brown interprets Brown though through the lens of his Caribbean heritage. For a discussion of perspective, see her City of Island: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 63–6. Cited in Winston James, 183–6. He is advancing the view that Caribbean migrants are among the pioneers of the Segregation movement. They began the segregation of the labor movement when qualified needle workers were denied employment because of their race. This practice seems to be consistent with that of Ethelred Brown regarding Unitarian Church of America.

414

Handbook of African American Theology

24 For an account of Garvey’s religious thought and theology, see Ernle P. Gordon, “Garvey and Black Liberation Theology”; Philip Potter, “The Religious Thought of Marcus Garvey” in Garvey: His Work and Impact, ed. Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research & Department of Extra-Mural Studies, 1988), 135–63; Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement (Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press and The American Theological Library Association, 1978); Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978); Amy Jacques-Garvey, Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey (New York: Atheneum, 1980). 25 Marcus Garvey, Cincinnati Speech, Negro World 10:02 (February 26, 1921): 6, cited in Randall Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement, 84. 26 Noel Erskine, Decolonizing Theology: A Caribbean Perspective (New York: Orbis Books, 1981). 27 For a current study on current contributions to African American theology and black Christianity, see Delroy A. Reid-Salmon, Home Away From Home: The Caribbean Diasporan Church in the Black Atlantic Tradition (London and Oakville: Equinox Publishing, 2008). See also Omar M. McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially 39–43 and 100–21. 28 For a general survey of these alliances, see also Winston James, Standing Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century America (New York: Verso, 1998). 29 Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington and Indianapolis (Indiana University Press, 1996), 1–10. 30 Watkins-Owens, 6–61. 31 Ibid., 61–2. 32 For a remarkable study on Harrison, consult Jeffery B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radical, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 33 J.A. Rogers, “Hubert Harrison,” New York Amsterdam News (February 3, 1923). 34 Winston James, Standing Aloft, 122–84. 35 Hubert Harrison, “A Tender Point,” in When Africa Awakes (New York; Porro Press, 1920): 86. 36 W.A. Domingo, “Gifts of Black Tropics,” in The New Negro ed. Alan Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 348. 37 W.E.B. Dubois, “Back to Africa,” Century Magazine (February 1923): 105. 38 Winston James, Standing Aloft, 50–121. 39 The forum was not only a political but also an intellectual center. For a detailed study on Brown’s forum ministry, see Tammy M. Brown, City Of Island: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2025), 61–2; also consult Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 61–3. 40 Ethelred Brown, “If Jesus Came to Harlem, What Would He Denounce?” December 1934 (Sermons and Notebooks), 1. Brown Papers, Box 4, Folder 2. 41 Ibid. 42 W.E.B. Dubois, The Crisis (September 1920): 214. 43 Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 165–75. 44 Brown, “If Jesus Came to Harlem.”

African American Theology and the Caribbean

415

Select bibliography Bauer, Elaine and Paul Thompson. Jamaican: Hands Across the Atlantic. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006. Brown, Tammy. City Of Island: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2025. Burkett, Randall K. Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978. ——. Garveyism as a Religious Movement. Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press and The American Theological Library Association, 1978. Chivallon, Christine. The Black Diaspora in the Americas; Experience and Theories out of the Caribbean. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2011. Cone, James H. Black Theology & Black Power. New York: Orbis Books, 1997. ——. Liberation: A Black Theology of Liberation. New York: Orbis Books, 1970. Davis, Kortright. Emancipation Still Comin’: Exploration in Caribbean Emancipatory Theology. New York: Orbis Books, 1990. Erskine, Noel. Plantation Church: How African American Religion was born in Caribbean Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ——. From Garvey to Marley: Rasta Theology. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2005. ——. Decolonizing Theology: A Caribbean Perspective. New York: Orbis Books. 1981. Floyd-Thomas, Juan M. The Origins of Black Humanism in America: The Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Unitarian Church. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas; Restoring the Links Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006. Jacques-Garvey, Amy. Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Jagessar, Michael N. and Anthony Reddie. Postcolonial Black British Theology: New Textures and Themes, Peterborough: Epworth, 2007. James, Winston. Standing Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century America. New York: Verso, 1998. Johnson, Sylvester A. African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy and Freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Lewis, Rupert and Patrick Bryan, eds. Garvey: His Work and Impact, Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research & Department of Extra-Mural Studies, 1988. McRoberts, Omar M. Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Maynard-Reid, Pedrito U. Diverse Worship: African-American, Caribbean & Hispanic Perspectives. Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000. Morrison-Reed, Mark D. Black Pioneer in a White Denomination. Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 1994. Reddie, Anthony. Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Reid-Salmon, Delroy A. Home Away From Home: The Caribbean Diasporan Church in the Black Atlantic Tradition. London and Oakville: Equinox Publishing, 2008. Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Black Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2005.

416

Handbook of African American Theology

Stephens, Michelle. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States. 1914–1942. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Sweet, James H. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Thomas, Deborah A. Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Turner, W. Burghardt, and Joyce Moore Turner. Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings. 1920–1972. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Ware, Frederick L. African American Theology: An Introduction. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016. Watkins-Owens, Erma. Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. New York: Orbis Books, 2013. Wright, Michelle M. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004.

31

Metals and Movens of Colored Television: The Spirit is a Bone: A Response to Marla F. Frederick’s Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global Nimi Wariboko

Introduction I read Professor Marla Frederick’s Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global as a continuation of her excellent scholarship that aims to understand, describe, and explain the “spirit” (the fine distillation) of the black church, even as she contests the meaning of that spirit, rejects the essentialization of black religion, or insists that there is no spirit or essence to the black church. It appears that in Frederick’s scholarship the act of positioning and prohibiting the spirit coincides, suggesting there is no need for the spirit, the “thing-in-itself ” of the black church. But this entitative or non-entitative process that is simultaneously necessary and impossible as a Lacanian Real provides the analytical frame for my engagement with her old and new books. In her recent book, she extends her analysis of the black church beyond the shining seas of America to shine light on the global reaches of the black church, American religion. Colored Television shows that scholars can no longer study the black church only in the United States.1 Through ethnographic and theoretical rigor, she examines the ways television encourages the globalization of black religion through the formation of new “communities” of the black church in Africa and African diasporas around the world. The part of the body of Christ that is named the black church exceeds the limits of African (-American) membership. In the era of globalization and the emergence of the global commons, the black church—like the worldwide body of Christ—has become one immense, cosmopolitan city or world city. Frederick offers us new ways of thinking about the black church, new maps of black religion to reorient us to its mystery, openness, and possibilities. We are summoned to think of the black church as people and their activities in the placelessness of social interactions and relations across the globe. This summons is undergirded by or embedded in a tension. While we are encouraged to think about what it would mean for black church studies to show fidelity to the possibility opened by the shift in existential spatiality of the black religion, the black church becoming globalized smooth non-place, Frederick’s work presupposes a certain level of placeness

418

Handbook of African American Theology

(mediated spaces) for black religion to function. The spirit of the black church that is reaching beyond the shores of the United States, finely moving as the wind, is an assemblage of mechanical contraptions, wires and satellites, journals of debit and credit, and bureaucratic tools that is anchored to concrete placeness. This tension between non-placeness and placeness reminds me of the tension in Hegel’s statement: “Spirit is a bone.”2 Hegel was referring to the argument of phrenology that the spirit is based on the human skull and there is nothing more to it. The shape of the skull determines the mind. What we regard as the spirit is what goes on in the brain encased by the skull. The bone is the spirit; the spirit is nothing but its bone. But there is the speculative view—preferred by Hegel—that the spirit is not its bone, not its appearance. The spirit (mind) can assert its identity over the bone or any inert matter to sublate it. The spirit is strong enough to mediate any hard stuff. Hegel goes on to compare the materialist, reductionist reading of the “spirit is a bone” to those who can only discern the phallus as the organ of urination, rather than as an instrument of both urination and insemination, a conjunction of the high and low.3 A careful reading of Frederick’s Colored Television brings forth its kind of spirit– bone tension. At some level you wonder if the spirit of the black church, or even the move of the Holy Spirit, is all about the infrastructure of communication cables, screens, set audiences, practiced performances, and the “bricks and mortar” of performative orchestration. At another level, you get the impression that the spirit (or the manifestations of the Holy Spirit) is independent of technologies of presentation and institutional skills. Which is which? Frederick does not answer this question directly. But we can discern how she leans through a Hegelian analysis. If the reader of Colored Television sees only infrastructural power then he or she is like those who can only discern the phallus as the organ of urination. But to see a possible path to the spirit (Spirit) from the failures, dense pragmatism, or instrumentality of the typical orchestration of the black televangelist megachurch is to be like those who can also discern the phallus as an organ of insemination, the higher function of generation. Hegel’s point is that we do not directly go for the best option or proper result with our first choice, but only through repeated failures. The choice of “insemination” comes only through repeatedly choosing “urination”; we arrive at the true choice via the wrong choice. If we try to directly discern the current state of the spirit of the black church from Frederick’s book, we will infallibly miss it. We will only see a crude mechanism and miss the fine distillation of Christian doctrines, ideas, practices, and divine presence. We need to read Colored Television over and over again to find our way to its deeper lesson. This Hegelian approach is also important for scholars interpreting the current “failures” of the black church. Now that I have stated how I intend to interpret Colored Television, let me describe how I intend to proceed with the rest of the task at hand. There are three sections in my essay. First, I will state the prehistory of Colored Television, so we can properly situate it in the deep structure of Frederick’s scholarship. Second, I will offer a philosophical analysis of the book; this discourse is the longest section of the essay. Finally, I will attempt to discern the provocative intellectual path that Frederick opened up in her book but failed to follow. That is, I will show her missed opportunities. Each of the

Metals and Movens of Colored Television

419

three sections uses or engages a different disciplinary apparatus to offer its movement and melody. Our discussion of prehistory utilizes the method of intellectual history, complemented by psychoanalytic philosophy, to tease out a preliminary biography of Frederick’s ideas on the black church. In the second section, I deploy continental philosophy to get into the deep structure of Colored Television, revealing the grooves and rails on which its narrative, theme, and thesis run. In the final section, Pentecostal theology offers us the password to lift the veil covering the not-yet-actualized trajectory of Frederick’s thought as embodied in her Colored Television. I will conclude by uncovering the “hidden” ethical injunction of Colored Television, and then playfully subject this injunction to some preliminary psychoanalytical analysis, to a kind of Žižekian joke. The joke might go like this: a husband tells his wife, “Not tonight dear, we shall not watch colored television! I am sick of . . .” The wife says, “Honey, I too cannot watch colored television. I am also sick.” Then the husband exclaims, “Let us watch colored television to heal my sickness.” The point of drawing out the “secret” ethical injunction of Colored Television through a joke is not only to reveal layers of ethical meaning and the shape of an idea from Frederick’s book, but also to show that play is central to seriousness in Pentecostal scholarship. In order to do all of this well, I will begin by combining the title of Frederick’s book with that of another African American scholar on black televangelism to generate the ethical injunction.

The past as a prologue: from black-and-white Between Sundays to Colored Television The ethnographic narrative of Colored Television begins at a local fast-food restaurant in Kingston, Jamaica. One can almost smell jerk and curried chicken. This is not the true beginning; something else came before. There is always a beginning before the beginning. Before Frederick declares that in the beginning there was jerk and curried chicken, her thoughts are caught up in the search for the Real (a Lacanian term) of the religious lived experience. Frederick’s scholarship starting from Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (2003) and advancing to Colored Television has been about the interplay between faith and concrete social reality—not as argued, but as lived.4 Her scholarship analytically describes how the part of life we call spiritual or religious finds expressions in everyday activities and social practices. These expressions are deeply probed by ethnographies that demonstrate how black Christian believers bring to bear their understandings of the immaterial Holy Spirit (God) on concrete practices and relationships. The appeal of her scholarship lies in the unfolding of human possibilities as lived experiences at the intersection of quotidian livingness and divine–human encounter. While she immerses her readers in the everyday religion or everyday theology of African Americans or blacks, it seems she has an underlying abiding interest that goads her work forward. She wants to identify the “spirit” of the black church. In concluding Between Sundays, which is about black women in rural Halifax County, North Carolina, she writes:

420

Handbook of African American Theology

The black church nationally will continue to negotiate its place in the world of political activism, redefining old boundaries and establishing new directives. The struggles of its people will vary from urban centers to rural countrysides, causing difficulty in establishing a monolithic agenda. The work of “the church” will then reside in the spirit and the spirituality of its people. Black women in Halifax help us to identify what the spirit looks like.5

To use Lacanian terminology, the search for the spirit of the black church has become the objet petit a, the object cause of her scholarship’s desire. She is looking for that mysterious X which accounts for the most-authentic black church experience, its prophetic stance, and its legendary capability of sustaining black persons and communities amid the rapacious racism that denigrates or degrades their humanity. The unfathomable X is what accounts for the unmistakable difference between black church and white church, the gap between the two Christian experiences in one country. Whether the gap exists or not does not matter, either way it must be presupposed or fantasmatically constructed if believers or scholars are to make sense of the structural (emotional, connectivity) gap between the experiences. The object that makes all the difference when there is no perceivable or conceivable positive difference is the objet petit a. Frederick is not a Lacanian scholar and she is perhaps unaware of the work of Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalytic philosopher. But as I interpret her two single-authored books, it appears their light-footed intellectual movements fit into some kind of Lacan’s triad of the Imaginary–Symbolic–Real. There is an idealized self-image of what African American Christians (Pentecostals and Charismatics), spurred on by black televangelists, want to be (imaginary). Her second book presents television as the source or purveyor of the ideal of Pentecostal Christian social existence. There is God (the Big Other) whom they want to impress through impassioned prayers, gifts, and the technology of the self on the self and who implores them to give the best of themselves to God and to the world (symbolic). They have a symbolic identification with God. Besides, the televangelistic black church stands in as the symbolic in its ability to create a universal language for negotiating and navigating believers’ daily lives and social existence on their way to the ideal of prosperity. So we can say that in Between Sundays, while she focused on the Real in so far as she was looking for the spirit that transpires or shines through the everyday reality of the black church, in Colored Television she shows the “symbolic” and the “imaginary” of the faith journey of black Christian communities. Lacan’s triad is not the only way to excavate the true beginning of Colored Television. In Between Sundays (218–19), Frederick talks about the need for scholars of the black church to focus on the internal impact of television ministries of black religious leaders on people’s lives or African American progress. She “predicts” the coming of Colored Television when she writes: Traditional studies of black churches as local and national bodies will have to expand their focus to include the international influence of satellite-transmitted religious programming in black communities across the globe. What, for example, does it mean for people in postcolonial African countries who struggle with

Metals and Movens of Colored Television

421

poverty and lack of access to land and a means of production to hear the messages of prosperity? What influence will this doctrine have on political engagement and social practice?6

We have been able to decipher the beginning of Colored Television, that is, its “primordial act of decision,” because Frederick’s scholarship has the rare good quality of being tautegorical, it explains itself. She keeps doing this over and over again in her two books. Almost every step of the way her scholarship in a dialectical process appropriates its own becoming in order to hold its ground even as it presents itself, or more appropriately, offers itself to us. Her scholarship not only attempts to expose the spirit, the fine thing about the black church, but it is also exposed, offered to view as the open sky. Which is to say, her scholarship reveals itself, traversing the impalpable spirit, the fine distillation of the body that is the black church, in fluid prose and transparent logic. This much is clear from her treatment of one of the vexing tensions in black church studies.

Come and see: the call of Colored Television Colored Television and Between Sundays reveal one of the fundamental tensions in the black church: personal transformation (individually focused) versus propheticpolitical activism (communally centered). The religious life presented in Between Sundays is more faithful to the famed prophetic stance of the black church than the spirituality that is revealed in Colored Television. In so far as these two forms of spirituality are integral to the black church, the first book (almost) had to call forth the second one if her scholarship is to remain faithful to twenty-first-century reality or to capture emerging developments in the black church. This call and response by the first book and its descendant, respectively, is done within a certain philosophical framework. In these two books, Dr. Marla Frederick is searching for the spirit, the real kernel of the black church in late capitalism. The spirit she is questing for is not one of true orthodoxy or straightforward prophetic resistance. In the two books she manages to transform the external opposition between the prophetic, social-justice religion and its transgression in the form of personal transformation into an opposition internal to the transgression or black religion itself. The subversive sting of her work is contained in her analysis of personal transformation. Those who cling to personal salvation in the midst of overwhelming inclination of the black church to public justice are the true subversives. This is not only because they balk against the grain, but also and more importantly their heavy, humdrum life has a subversive character. For instance, the women who consistently tithe and give offerings to their churches are not only resisting consumerism, but are also from within building the black church, engaging their individual worlds as “private activists.”7 These seemingly simple women of Halifax County do not have the change-halo of Martin Luther King, Cornell West, or Al Sharpton, but the repetitive humdrum of their everyday lives and spiritual practices shows their creativity. Monotony here, according to Frederick, is not absence of

422

Handbook of African American Theology

innovation, diversity, or vitality, but a bearer of creativity and magic. We get, perhaps, the full force of Frederick’s way of presenting matters (dialectical coincidence of opposites) if we cast our minds to the catholic writer G.K. Chesterton: The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. . . . It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. . . . A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. But, perhaps, God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun.8

In Colored Television, Frederick demonstrates that the effort to preserve an authentic public focus of the black church against the onslaught of the private, other-worldly focus does not deliver the expected goods. It is the public focus itself that changes, transformed into the instrumental, objectivized, commodified public sphere or upending the notion of “black church as a public sphere.” The transformation of black Christians previously given to the other-worldly form of spirituality into folks enamored by this-worldly interests has meant their use of products and services of the modern-culture industry or the commodified public exchange to authenticate the personal, private sphere. The withdrawal of the segments of the black church (especially the Pentecostals) from their other-worldly form of spirituality has produced a privatized this-worldly realm for them. This kind of production or transformation brings into relief the tension between freedom (liberation) and happiness in the black church. If the much-lauded prophetic church puts its accent on freedom, the new televangelism-inflected black church emphasizes happiness (a pleasurable life). The issue we need to ponder is this: are freedom and happiness not integral to Christianity qua the black church? Was the message of the black church in the midst of antebellum slavery and post-bellum rabid racism all about the work of renunciation of earthly pleasures and enjoyment? Was there no vision of the human flourishing that did not carry the price of suffering and renunciation of earthly pleasures? Didn’t black folks envisage the freedom wrought through prophetic resistance as at least clearing a path toward some minimal level of earthly enjoyment, jouissance? Was a desire for the taste of earthly pleasures absent in the black church during slavery and the Jim Crow era? Seen from this crucial perspective, can we still maintain that there is external opposition between freedom and a pleasurable life? The only problem, it seems, is that the prosperitygospel-driven churches with impunity have elevated this desire too much to the surface, thereby disturbing the fragile balance or right distance between liberation and happiness. Frederick’s two books have transformed what many less careful scholars consider as an external opposition between other-worldly Christianity and this-worldly Christianity, between praxis of social transformation and resistance and politics of

Metals and Movens of Colored Television

423

accommodation, into an internal opposition within this-worldly sphere, within resistance as worked out in the processes of the black church. There is thus an implicit Hegelian dialectical process in the Frederickian engagement with the critique or celebration of the black church: the external opposition (between prophetic religion and personal salvation) is often transformed into internal opposition within the core of the black church. This is the inner truth of her study of the black church. Is Frederick’s work then not calling us to go beyond the opposition between the two regnant views of the black church to a third one: a diagonalization of the two arcs of perspective? She displaces or decenters the external limits between the two. The limit is no longer prophetism and its exception (enjoying the pleasures of the American capitalist culture: the prophetic ethos runs in the midst of happiness). African American Christians have to pursue happiness as though they are not pursuing it. Their attitude is neither to accomplish freedom, nor simply to abandon or exhibit indifference to earthly pleasures, enjoyment, but to participate in the work of liberation with a right distance and attitude toward pleasures or private matters. That is, in the manner of St. Paul’s as-if-not stance, engaging the world and its social obligations with an attitude of suspension. Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called. . . . I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. 1 Cor. 7:20, 29-31

The Christians profiled in both Between Sundays and Colored Television in multiple and complex ways show that while they have their focus on earthly pleasures, there is a suspension of full commitment to them in so far as they are interpellated by the word of God. This does not mean that we will all like the variant of “social justice” praxis that emerges from Frederick’s terrain of thought that embeds the prophetic and the pleasurable in one frame. But she does well to subvert the reader’s received wisdom on what social justice is supposed to mean in the black church. She works the tension in the reader’s mind much like a good comedian plays with tensions in his narratives to subvert long-held beliefs. There is a certain stylish humor in Frederick’s thought at play or on display in the two books. Her creation or exploration of the third (emergent) terrain relies on the tension (split) between the prophetic and the pleasurable, on the prohibitions in the liberal religious academy against elevating the status of the culture of nonprophetic black church. Or her examination of the third state functions on the scholarly resistance that inhibits efforts to think the two regnant moods as far as possible so that opposites coincide. She is in no way advocating for the obsolescence of the prophetic model of the black church. She needs it to bring to basic relief the dialectic interdependence between the prophetic model and its transgression in the

424

Handbook of African American Theology

form of the televangelist prosperity gospel, pleasure-oriented life, the black church and its excess creates the emergent third force field she is adept at exploring. At this point I need to confess my perplexity about Frederick’s work. I cannot assume that there is some sort of complete unity to Frederick’s two books or the emergent third frame. Let me reveal three dimensions of this perplexity. First, the existence of the two models, two identities (prophetic and pleasure) in one single body, signifies that the black church can disrupt its own functioning. The black church does not coincide with itself. In its aliveness as an institution there is always an excess, too muchness of life (Eric Santner’s terminology). Instead of thinking this gap, accepting this inconsistency, or recognizing this negativity, Frederick’s work and those like hers ground it in another modality, “in another, ‘deeper,’ positivity.”9 The kind of split in the black church we are talking about here might not be the effect of the present generation of black religious leaders deviating from the preexisting spirit of the black church. It may well be that the “spirit” is the effect of this break (negativity), gap, or inconsistency. The spirit may well be the ontologization of the break. Instead of thinking of the split as causing the etiolation, the “curvature” of spirit, we should think of the spirit as its effect. If this proposal is considered as correct, Frederick’s scholarship, which we have described as the “third terrain” of black church studies, already inhabits and embodies the split. Do we then say the spirit of the black church Frederick is trying to uncover and explain is so near to her that she does not see it? Second, I am not sure if Frederick is aware that this excess, this tension between the two models, is that of Christianity itself. What is a poor African American wealth-andhealth gospel church in its transgression of the prophetic praxis compared to the absolute excess of what William Connolly calls the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine”?10 In other words, is the spirit of the black church different from the spirit of (contemporary) Christianity, or for that matter American Christianity? Third, I am tempted to say that in Frederick’s quest for the spirit, the real kernel of the black church, she is simultaneously looking for that which is in Christianity more than Christianity itself. What is the object in Christianity (the Lacanian objet petit a) that makes Christianity the object of desire by black folks as well as billions of believers all over the world in this day of late capitalism, which renders fragile the fabric of social existence? In the world of assemblage that is the capitalist-Christian resonance machine one cannot but ask what is the terrifying desire of capitalism on Christianity? And what sort of symbolic castration (the price of inclusion in the capitalist symbolic order) must the prophetic and pleasure models endure to gain access to the jouissance of neoliberal capitalism? Is the spirit of the black church and its various incarnations over the years, the objet a and its incarnations, not answers (responses) to the questions of capitalism’s desire? To put it differently, is the spirit of the black church external to the symbolic order of capitalism? Let us end this section of the essay by highlighting some of the critical gaps in Colored Television. First, Frederick’s treatment of the media is one-sided. She celebrates the reach of black religion outside the United States, inside black communities in the Caribbean and Africa. There is no investigation of how religious leaders in the Caribbean and Africa are also influencing black religious leaders and African Americans. Are the black communities outside the United States mere sitting ducks or

Metals and Movens of Colored Television

425

passive receptacles for ideas coming from African American evangelism? I am sure the traffic is not on a one-way street. Second, Frederick’s book in an important sense is about the spatial relations between forms of Christianity. But it ignores a crucial aspect of the socio-spatial dialectics of the church, the relationship between core and periphery in the movements of the Holy Spirit over the 2000 years of Christian history. The geography of divine presence is shot through with a dynamic of core and periphery, concentration and dispersal. Andrew Walls, the Scottish church historian, has analyzed Christianity’s history and the missionary movements in terms of core–periphery relation, the “geographically uneven” presence of the Holy Spirit in regions over time.11 The historical movement of the Spirit, according to him, is from the core to the periphery. Subsequent centers of Christianity always developed at the margin of earlier forms before assuming prominence. Wall’s insight in a certain sense plays on the dynamics of the relationship between black (American) religion and communities in Africa and the Caribbean, especially when the gravity of Christianity is shifting from the North to the South. What do the regional or spatial inequalities in the presence, intensity, or reception of the divine power mean for the continued expansion, growth, and survival of the black church (located in the North) or its ability to project its power and presence overseas? This question is all the more important in the light of Frederick’s treatment that downplays or ignores the (potential) contributions of the Christianities of the South to the black religion of the North. Much more troubling than this one-sidedness is her silence on the fact that black religion is part of American power and to the extent that it crosses national boundaries it promotes the imperialistic goals or the soft power of the American empire. Black religion, being immediate and mediated by religious broadcast in the Caribbean and Africa, is itself a representation of certain theogonic, economic, and political powers of the United States that it mediates. It is not enough for Frederick to say the locals are selectively adapting and authenticating the messages and images coming from the black religious leaders to bypass the suffocating proximity of American powers in Africa and the Caribbean. We must also locate the place of major black televangelists in the role the United States plays in what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the formation of glomus, homogenizing globe/totality that is a “land of exile” and a “vale of tears” instead of the formation of a “world,” which is meaningful and gives a sense of belonging to those in the totality.12 Fourth, Frederick’s discussion and interpretation of the role of African American religious broadcasts in black communities in Africa and the Caribbean engages in some sort of this is that hermeneutics. The behaviors or responses she observed in Jamaica or Nigeria are similar (if not identical) to what happened (or is happening) in the United States. The this is that, in a sense, means there is virtually no distance between black American Pentecostalism and those of Africa and the Caribbean, between the thisness of Jamaica (or Nigeria), and the thatness of the United States. The this is the transparent medium of the voice that enables the self-presence of the that. This is that is both a remainder and an excess. What you are seeing in Jamaica, for instance, is the overflow of the power and reach of the black ministry in the United States. The that in the “metropolis” is the driving force of her hermeneutics and the

426

Handbook of African American Theology

Pentecostal desiring in the “periphery.” We are never really told in a serious way how the “this is not that,” the experiences of the subjects in the this column might not be those of the subjects in the that column. In other words, there is no mention of the fact that the that which gives form and body to the this (Pentecostal desiring) can never satisfy the desire. Finally, let me mention that she does not locate the story and success of the black television preachers in the larger context of African American Christians and missionaries who have been going to Africa and the Caribbean to spread the gospel and to build and strengthen communities of faith. The history of the transnationalism of American black Christians in Africa and Jamaica is well documented. Today the international television ministries of the black religious leaders are continuing to deepen such longstanding connection and commitment with technology and expertise. Thus, the ethnography of Colored Television needs the history of Christian transnationalism, sociology of religious communities in Africa and the Caribbean that were set up by African Americans before the emergence of T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, and Juanita Bynum, and the theology of global civil society if we are to complete the portrait it has started to paint.

Watch out for this!: future programming on Colored Television In this moment and movement of the essay, instead of investigating the deep structure of her expressed thought or point to the questions the Colored Television left unanswered, I want to follow a trail of thought implicitly unfolded throughout the book. I invite you, the reader, to join me to regain or uncover the creative impulse that Frederick missed in the actualization of her thought. Walk with me to connect to “what was already in ‘[Frederick] more than [Frederick] herself,’ more than [her] explicit system, its excessive core.”13 This is to say, reading Frederick to isolate the key breakthrough of her thought in this book as it relates to the notion of the charismatic city,14 global civil society; then demonstrate how she necessarily missed this key dimension of her own discovery, and “finally, showing how, in order to do justice to [her] key breakthrough, one has to move beyond [Frederick].”15 This going beyond means betraying the “letter” (actual) of her thought in order to grasp its “spirit” (virtual). So precisely what is the dimension of the charismatic city that shines through in the explosion of thought on the globalization of black religion and its concrete actualization in her Colored Television but slipped into the virtual state and haunts any close reading of the book? What is the proper embodiment of this excess betrayed by Frederick’s book? The notion of the charismatic city is inherent in Frederick’s thought, but she did not comprehend its implications deeply enough; she felt she was dealing with black (American) religion gone global rather than an ethnography of the charismatic city. Frederick was describing the dimensions and the workings of the charismatic city amid the global resurgence of religion, but did not quite recognize, name, or own it. She was describing the networks and rhizomes and the spirituality that not only found them but also feeds on them and together they are reconstructing the shape of civilization in a globalizing world. Colored Television is as much an ethnography of

Metals and Movens of Colored Television

427

black religion gone global as it is an ethnography of charismatic spirituality in the global city. Two powerful and interrelated transnational cultural expressions mark our epoch. They are charismatic spirituality and the global city. Both charismatic spirituality and the global city are dimensions of interconnectedness and awareness of such. Charismatic spirituality carries this awareness beyond the quantifiable material domain. The global city is not only a paradigm of interconnectedness, but also a state of experience of interconnectedness. The global city, a physical property, and charismatic spirituality, a non-physical property, flow together, resonate with one another to create and shape a spatial and experiential emergence, which I have named “the charismatic city.”16 The charismatic city is a dyadic space of attunement where residents’ awareness of the city goes beyond its physical aspects and limit. In this expansion, a city is perpetually connected through flows and outflows to spaces and times in other parts of the globe. The global city itself is a panhuman interconnectedness, as if it is no longer limited by space and time. Its boundlessness and ephemeral character resonate with the lightness of being and transgression of limits that characterize life in the spirit. The mutual penetration of global city and charismatic spirituality gives an expanded view of the city and human existence. Residents (especially those involved in charismatic spirituality) have the “experience of feeling a connection to something that is beyond [their view] of self as limited by space and time.”17 Both the material city and the self-transcending spirituality gesture to something beyond, point to the what-is-to-come. The charismatic city is, at one and the same time, the expression of the global city and a protest against the global city. It is an articulation of the body of Christ. In Colored Television we see a dimension of the body of Christ, proper to the forms of connectedness and mutuality in our present world, proper to the shared ethics and aesthetics of sensations of divine presence in the current resurgence of Christianity, and proper to the remarkable affinities between the development of the global city and the appeal of new communication technologies. In a sense Colored Television offers a fresh and challenging articulation of the character of the global charismatic renewal of Christianity in the framework of cities, the socio-economic situation of poor urban residents, and urban space, resulting in a vision for the city as a religious, ethical, and political space. The book is an examination of the city as a site of intense human encounter with God and a metaphor for the new thing God is doing in history. It is a discourse of charismatic spirituality as the dispersal of divine presence into the interstices and connections of the global city, and as an emerging disruptive cosmopolitan ethos. The two currents—worldwide charismatic spirituality and the global city—are conjoined and animated by globalization, a series of dynamic intense connectedness. Globalization is a context for both forces. All these ideas are implicit in Colored Television, but Frederick misses them—misses elevating and developing them—because she is clearly too focused on black religion. She does not work to capture some of the directions suggested by the explosion of her thought. Let me immediately state that her focus on black religion should not necessarily exclude her embrace of the charismatic city concept or trend. Historian Dana Robert has shown that Christians in many parts of the world (Africa, Latin

428

Handbook of African American Theology

America, and Asia) as early as the beginning of the twentieth century have learned to locate their national focus or narratives within a framework of common global society.18 Robert will concur with my suggestion that what Frederick is documenting and describing in her book is Christian transnationalism or world ecclesia. Particularly, her description of the distribution of message and the voices of the next generation, respectively, in chapter 6 and the conclusion not only strongly reminds me of a deep, but unconscious understanding of the charismatic city, but also captures something of the secular and sacred cities that live alongside the charismatic city, and the changes happening in delineating the body of Christ in these days of internet and cyberworship as I described them in my 2014 book, The Charismatic City.19 I find a kindred spirit in her work. Her major scholarship that began in 2003 with Between Sundays set out to capture the spirit of black religion, but in Colored Television ends up capturing the spirit of the worldwide charismatic city. We are all in her debt and are proud of her accomplishment.

Concluding thoughts: the jokes on Colored Television I would like to end this essay by uncovering and examining a hidden ethical injunction concerning prosperity gospel in Colored Television. In order to do this well I want to combine the titles of Jonathan Walton’s book, Watch This! and Frederick’s Colored Television into an injunction, since the two books deal with televangelism and the ubiquitous presence of prosperity gospel in black communities.20 The title of Walton’s book suggests the founding gesture of television as a mode of expression and communication of religious ideas and emotions. Watch This! (Ladies and gentlemen, this is an injunction.) Let us consider Frederick’s book in the register of the same founding gesture. In other words, let us read the title, Watch This!, together with Colored Television. In this mixture, we get the injunction: “Thou shall watch colored television.” But when the free mixture of the titles is set against the contents of both books, we get the opposite, “Thou shall not watch colored television.” In both books televisionpropagated prosperity message fares poorly. What is the actual identity of the two prohibitions given that the obscenity of the superego, which Žižek never fails to warn us, always attends every ethical prohibition?21 The obscene superego supplement has a way of turning prohibitions into their opposites; to impossible demands—hence their obscenity. This prohibition appears either as a cancellation of Walton’s formal imperative or negation of Frederick’s and Walton’s work. In the simple sense of a joke, “Thou shall not watch colored television” can be taken to mean: “Do not read Watch This! and Colored Television.” But jokes can offer shortcuts to key philosophical insights. And in this sense, the prohibition (“Thou shall not watch colored television”) is neither a cancellation of Walton’s formal imperative nor a negation of both books, but their sublation. The imperative is retained or accomplished through its very suspension. The imperative as an ideal of the symbolic order is immediately caught up in the dialectic of desire, a prohibition generating the desire itself to violate it. In order to see this clearly we need to read Walton avec Frederick according to the Pauline dialectic of

Metals and Movens of Colored Television

429

Romans 7, showing the absolute identity of the two injunctions, “thou shall . . .” and “thou shall not. . .” St. Paul states in Romans 7 that the law, prohibition generates a desire to transgress it due to the underside of the law, the obscene superego supplement. In this reasoning I would not have the desire to transgress if the law has not asked me to do a particular thing. More importantly, the superego works in both forms of the injunctions to truncate them into two complementary parts. In the Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek writes: The superego splits every determinate commandment into two complementary, albeit asymmetrical, parts—“You shall not kill!,” for instance, is split into the formal-indeterminate “You shall not!” and the obscene direct injunction “Kill!” The silent dialogue which sustains this operation is thus: “You shall not!” “I shall not—what? I have no idea what is being demanded of me! Che vuoi?” “You shall not!” “This is driving me crazy, being under pressure to do something without knowing what, feeling guilty without knowing of what, so I’ll just explode, and start killing!” Thus killing is the desperate response to the impenetrable abstract superego prohibition.22

“Thou shall not watch colored television” becomes “Thou shall not!” and its obscene injunction “Watch!” Under pressure to watch something but without knowing exactly what (this or that, religious or secular, and so on) I am asked to watch, I just plunge into endless watching. The splitting of an injunction into its formal and indeterminate asymmetrical parts opens up a gap within the person who is under the law as law (through its underside) generates its own transgression. “This gap opens up the abyss of the superego: you yourself should know what or guess what you should not do, so that you are put in an impossible position of always and a priori being under suspicion of violating some (unknown) prohibition.”23 Being asked to read watch this Colored Television in order to participate in this book panel sets up a commandment that renders me already always guilty of some (unknown) prohibition. Do I give up my poor, uncolored, television to read-watch Frederick’s Colored Television? What is demanded of me? Read watch this or that book? What do I read if I am to go beyond the usual book review or response and think Frederick’s thought after her? How do I read her if I hope to advance the flight of thought she has launched in order to offer valuable insights into her philosophy of black church studies? Not knowing what, therefore I just exploded, and started reading. Reading is always the desperate response to the impenetrable abstract superego prohibition that undergirds academic invitation to talk. Lest I forget, you now understand how the husband and wife I mentioned at the beginning of this essay ended up watching colored television. Theirs was a special case of the logic of the Hegelian triad complemented by the obscenity of the superego supplement. Dr. Marla Frederick’s scholarship in its working out of the emergent third terrain of methodological approach to black studies and its inherent transgression of prohibitions of the severe form of the prophetic stance of traditional black studies may also be considered a special case—just more interesting.

430

Handbook of African American Theology

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Marla F. Frederick, Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 210. See also Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 81–5. Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Ibid., 220. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 168–85. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 65–6, quoted in Žižek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 41. Žižek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 70 (italics in the original). William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity: American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986). Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: University of New York Press, 2007), 140–3. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 140. For a discussion of the charismatic city see Nimi Wariboko, The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion: A Pentecostal Social Ethics of Cosmopolitan Urban Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 33. Žižek adds, “What characterizes a really great thinker is that they misrecognize the basic dimension of their own breakthrough” (34). The ideas and construction of this paragraph and the next one are indebted to Eric Bergemann, Daniel J. Siegel, Deanie Eichenstein, and Ellen Streit, “Neuroscience and Spirituality,” in In Search of Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Personhood, ed. J. Wentzel van Huyssteen and Erik P. Wiebe (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 83–103. Bergemann et al., “Neuroscience and Spirituality,” 88. Dana L. Robert, “Christian Transnationalists, Nationhood and the Construction of Civil Society” in Religion and Innovation: Antagonists or Partners, ed. Donald A. Yerxa (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 141–56. Frederick, Colored Television, 163, 164, 171, 174. Jonathan Walton, Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Žižek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 104–5. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 104–5.

Epilogue Eric Lewis Williams and Antonia Michelle Daymond

As evidenced within the preceding chapters, the essays included within this volume spotlight the international, intergenerational, ecumenical, and contextual character of African American theological thought. One of the primary ways in which the wide influence of African American theology is demonstrated within this volume is through a critical consideration of the range of disciplinary and vocational contexts from which the contributors to the volume reflect. With scholarly contributions written by pastors, theological educators, museum professionals, psychotherapists, denominational executives, historians, theologians, ethicists, and Bible scholars, the wide-ranging diversity of African American religious thought is brought into both fuller and clearer focus. As an outgrowth of the vision of theological diversity offered within this volume, and in the spirit of theological generosity characteristic of the long tradition of African American theology, it is imperative that other trajectories of black religious thought be engaged for a more robust account of the tradition for the future. These trajectories include engagement with the scholarship emanating from the new African religious diaspora in America; deeper and more serious engagement of perspectives from womanist and other black female religious thinkers; and the need to open new avenues of dialogue with black non-theistic and alternative religious traditions.

The epicenter: black women Generally speaking, it has become fashionable for black male theologians and scholars of religion to singularly express a need for “inclusion” within the field. Despite these efforts, however, there are few succinct efforts among them to deconstruct the politics of gender and how masculine tropes are appropriated within the history of the black Protestant tradition and black religious scholarship to uplift and maintain hegemonic black masculinity. Without this necessary catechization, “including” others will not be effective because these particularities are still situated in a male normative gaze, which is bolstered by an exclusionary and marginalizing construction. Notwithstanding the fact that black male religious scholars have made a clarion call for the “inclusion” of women; they have not recognized nor acknowledged that the discourse of black

432

Handbook of African American Theology

theology is based on a normative model of black masculinity that leaves little room for empowerment for anyone that is not circumscribed by this model. Hence, gestures of “inclusivity,” or “inclusion,” like the annexation of the phrase “women, gender, and sexual orientation” to the word “race,” have the possibility of being ineffective. To put it bluntly, the word “inclusion” is a word commonly used as a footnote, as if this one word can answer the anxieties, or conciliate the concerns, of those who suffer from Sisyphean gender oppression. The perspectives of black women religious scholars critique, correct, and complement blind spots and biases of a male-dominated black theological scholarship, which positions them not as a mere extension of the discipline but the very core of it. If black religious discourse is to remain effective for future consideration, women can’t just be placeholders but must be acknowledged and engaged as the driving force that has pushed African American religious scholarship to where it is today. Borrowing the title from Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’s text, “If It Wasn’t For The Women,” where would the discipline be? For the advancement of the African American theological tradition, these considerations must be placed at the very top of the agenda.

Not a monolith: the plurality of African American religious beliefs and practices In an age of rapid increasing pluralism within black life, we must expand our religious engagement beyond the triangular dialogue with the Abrahamic religions as African American conceptions and practices of religion are much broader in scope and ultimately are not monolithic but diverse. As such, these multifaceted religious expressions have historically reflected and continue to reflect the worldviews, belief structures, ritual practices, symbols, arts, and cultures of people of African descent throughout the United States. While many of these traditions share commonalities because of the significant number of dissimilarities that abound, attention must be given to alternative forms of religious, philosophical, and ideological expressions embraced by Americans of African descent. While most discussions on black religion consider only polytheism or monotheism, African American religious traditions defy such simplistic categorizations. Moreover, although theism continues to hold a prized standing within black religious thought, the African American religious tradition is also inclusive of individuals and communities that believe in no transcendent god/s at all, including black atheists, humanists, naturalists, freethinkers, and other non-theists. These nontheistic traditions rigorously question the supposed divine commitment to justice in the face of centuries of unrelenting black suffering and debate the rationality of theism with its appeals to metaphysical realities. In addition, reckoning with black non-theistic and freethinking traditions allows the discipline to grapple deeply with alternative conceptions of humanity, community, freedom, theodicy, and morality. Thus, African American theological scholarship must seek to expand the conversation about this understudied creative sector of African American religious thought and life.

Epilogue

433

A new emergence: the African religious diaspora in America The future of African American theology, if it is to remain viable, must also engage with the emergent scholarship of theologians and religious intellectuals from the new African religious diaspora, given both diasporas share common origins in Africa; their common orientation to the Spirit/spirit[s]; and their common belief structures and religious practices. In establishing a dialogue between African American and continental-born African theologians, a number of issues might be considered. While black theologians have argued for over half a century that social location shapes the theological conversation, a discussion must first be held about the United States as a hermeneutical situation and Africa as both historical reality and religious image. According to the February 21, 2005 edition of the New York Times, “since 1990 . . . more [continental-born Africans] have arrived voluntarily than the total who disembarked in chains before the United States outlawed international slave trafficking in 1807.” The religious implications of this new historical reality provide an unsurpassed opportunity for dialogue between what is now two distinct trajectories of African migrants residing on the shores of the United States en masse. How can scholars of black religion now reengage the “myth” of Africa given these new historical and social realities? How do African American religious scholars understand the impact of African religiosity on black expressive cultures—music, dance, art, literature, film—influenced by shifting patterns of migration as well as historical patterns of African American cultural production? How do we understand black religious institutions in light of the new African religious diaspora, including black churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues, where blacks from both diasporas contribute meaningfully to the community’s religious life? Given their involuntary removal from the continent, according to Charles Long, for African Americans the image of Africa is unique as “the image of the land points to the religious meaning of the land,” and, despite having no residential experience of Africa, its image in the [African American] religious imagination “emerges as one invested with great historical and religious possibilities.” For continental Africans, the image of Africa serves a different religious function altogether. According to Long,“(continentalborn) Africans know and live a concrete relationship” with Africa, and for them “Africa as a reality is embedded in their customs, speech, dress and all the normal forms of cultural and social reality.” Due to their vastly different relationships to the land and the function of the image of Africa as a religious meaning for both communities, Long notes the various implications for theologizing about Africa by these two distinctive African diasporan siblings: The facticity of the land for the African allows his religious thinking and theologizing to be tempered by topos in a manner that Black American theologians tend to be utopian in their theologizing with little of the tempering effects of topos. By topos I mean the sense of being in a place and knowing what the place means and having traditions, languages, modes of life that makes that place, your place, an intimate and familiar place. It is also the sense that one’s ancestors know that place, that they humanized it and gave it a name, and that in their customs and languages there is a wisdom for the coming generations.

434

Handbook of African American Theology

If African descendant theologians from both diasporas are willing to engage in dialogue, it would provide African American theologians with an opportunity for a deeper reflection on Africa as a religious meaning, beyond the usual historico-mythic engagement. It would also provide African immigrant theologians with deeper insights into the historic experience of African Americans and the development of their religious consciousness, given the social context in which this religious imagination was formed. Furthermore, such a fruitful exchange would provide African Americans an unsurpassed opportunity to grapple with the complexity of contemporary racial and ethnic experiences in the United States, as well as provide an occasion for theologians from both diasporas to explore the rich cultural and ethnic diversity resident within the nation’s population. This would in turn provide black theologians with a more sophisticated understanding of race and ethnicity, with crucial implications for the flourishing of black life in the present culture of death. It is important that future proposals within the field of African American theology be tempered by this critical consciousness as this will be imperative if all black lives truly matter.

Biblical Citations Index Old Testament Genesis, 1:27 10 Deuteronomy, 28:15-17 110 Psalms, 139:11-12 130 Proverbs 6:9-11 110–11 10:4 111 Jeremiah 1:5 273 1:19 274 7:1-15 275 20:7 274 28:15-16 275–6 Ezekiel, 2:5 274

Amos 2:6-8 111–12 7:14-15 274 New Testament Matthew, 3:13-17 202 John 4:35 399 19:25 201 Acts, 17:6 399 1 Corinthians 7:20, 29-31 423 11:17-34 204–5

Subject Index abandoned black community 40 abolitionism 12, 13 Acts 16:30 33 Afonso I 25 African American Christian Ethics 313, 315–16 Harlem Renaissance 315–17, 319, 320–1 African American church. See black church African American evangelicalism 73 Circle Church 82–5 John Perkins 79–82 Tom Skinner 78–9 African American Pentecostals 77 See also Pentecostalism African American prophetic preaching 277–80 African American religious beliefs, plurality of 432 African American theological production 237–8 black church 245–7 ethical dimension 242–4 interlocutor challenges 247–50 political contextuality 244–5 theological training 250–1 womanist theology 239–41 African American theology 403–4 future 397–9 plurality of praxis 404–5, 406 See also black theology African diaspora 392–3, 433–4 African kingship 337 African traditional religions (ATR) 226–7, 228–9 See also indigenous religions Africentric biblical hermeneutics 105 Afrocentrism 264 Afrofuturism 42, 44n25

Afro-Pentecostal interracialism 48, 50, 51–6 politics of dis-rupture 51–2 politics of inversion 52–3 politics of subversion 53–4 politics of transcendence 54–5 agency 160, 221, 330–1 Ahrendt, Hannah 153–5 Allen, Richard 134 alternative community 274 American Dilemma, An (Myrdal) 133 Amos 214, 274 Amott, Teresa L. 394 ancient Greek philosophy 130 Anderson, Victor 157–9 Andrews, Dale P. 287–8, 292 anthropology 185–7 anti-blackness 163–4 apocalyptic eschatology 214, 215, 217, 219, 221 Appiah, Anthony 159 Aristotle 130, 141 “At Calvary” 198 attachment theory 393 attributional accounts 144 Augustine 153–5 Aycock, Charles 37 Azusa Street Revival 51–2, 75, 174 Baker, Mary Ann 59–60 Baldwin, James 61, 188–90, 193, 257–8, 266 Baltimore, Maryland 199–200 Bantum, Brian 161–2 baptism 197–8, 314 benediction 208–9 embodiment 200 politics of 202–3 practice of 203–4 ritual renewal 199–200

438

Subject Index

Baptists 91 Barth, Karl 117–18 Beckford, Robert 397 benediction 208–9 Bentley, William H. 77 Between Sundays (Frederick) 419–21 bias 108, 140–1, 142, 143 Bilali 24 Birmingham Four 204 black aesthetic 319–21 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy) 61–2 black biblical hermeneutics 105 Black Bodies and the Black Church (Douglas) 290–2 Black Brethren 76 black church 244–7, 248–9, 257, 323 black theology 259–66, 324, 325–9 breaches of justice 287–92 leadership 324, 332 ministry 324, 329–32 mission 89 radical inclusion 292–3 black church invisible 197 black communities 40 black ecumenism 297–8 ecumenical activity 304 ecumenical engagement 308 ecumenical vision 301–3, 305–6, 308–9 racism 306–8 understandings of ecumenism 304–5 Black Empire (Stephens) 406 black feminism 252n9 See also womanism black humanism 354, 358–60, 361, 407 black humanity 151–64 anti-blackness 163–4 black liberation theology 156–8 body 159–62 imago dei 154–5 multi-dimensionality 158–9 black liberation agenda 287–92 radical inclusion 292–3 black liberation theology 156–8, 227–8, 329, 331, 384–5 Black Lives Matter 68–9, 331 “Black Political Theology” conference 249–50 black prophetic preaching. See African American prophetic preaching

black Protestantism 48 Black Radio 41, 42 Black Social Gospel Movement 40 black stereotypes 318–19 black struggle for justice 15–16 black subjectivity 232–3 black theologians, first and second generation 225, 233–4n1, 261 black theology 237–8, 324, 325–9 and black church 259–66, 287–8 future 397–9 origins 391–2 suffering 361 UK 396–7 in white churches 265 See also African American theological production; black liberation theology Black Theology and Black Power (Cone) 1, 157, 226, 353 Black Theology of Liberation, A (Cone) 156, 238 black womanist theology. See womanist theology black women 160–1, 232–3, 307, 431–2 See also womanist theology black-led religious interracialism 47 See also Afro-Pentecostal interracialism #BlackLivesMatter 199 blackness 132, 156–7, 159, 163–4, 232 Blood Relations (Watkins-Owen) 408 blues bodies 291–2 body 153, 159–62 See also embodiment body plus organs (BpO) 341, 342 body without organs(BwO) 341, 342 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 134 Bowker, John 355 Bowlby, John 393 Brigs, Cyril 410 Brooks, Ira 397 Brown, Ethelred 407, 410–11 Brown, Michael 139 Brown, Sterling 317–18 Brown Douglas, Kelly. See Douglas, Kelly Brown Brueggemann, Walter 61, 272–3, 274 Buber, Martin 125

Subject Index Burnard, Trevor 394 Butler, Lee 392 Butler, Marion 36 Byron, Gay L. 247, 248, 252n9 Cannon, Katie G. 1, 239–40, 279, 370 capitalism 261, 262 Caribbean diasporan theology 404–12 alliances between African American theology and 408–12 common heritage with African American theology 405–6 contributions to African American theology 406–8 Caribbean migrants 395–6 Carpenter, Delores C. ecumenism 302, 303, 305, 306, 307, 308 professional life 310n9 Carroll, Vincent 119 Catholic Church 362–3 Catholicism 26 Cavanaugh, William 202 CEO pastors 335–6, 338–45, 346–7 towards non-CEO pastors 345–6 Chalcedonian notion 161 charismatic city 426–8 charismatic spirituality 427 Charleston Nine 204 chattel principle 215 chattel slavery 9–10 black aesthetic 319 Caribbean 405 Christianity 14, 19–20, 24–7 Exodus narrative 227–8 God Struck Me Dead (Johnson) 218 human dignity 10–11, 15 indigenous West African religions 20–2 Islam 22–4 James Pennington 215–17 middle passage 314–15, 393 non-institutional religious traditions 27–9 oral tradition 227 resistance to 11–14 resistance to white preachers 172–3 trade routes 20–1 violence 394 cheap grace 134 Chesterton, G.K. 422

439

Chicago 75 Christ, Carol 373 Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) 304, 305 Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) 81 Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church 304 Christian orthodoxy 119 church God’s justice 285–6 open church 82–3, 84 and race 131–3 white church 362–3 See also black church Church of God in Christ (COGIC) 53, 304, 305 Circle Church 82–5 Civil Rights Era 230–3 Civil Rights Movement 243, 300, 330 hegemonic masculinity 238–9 individualism 287 John Perkins 81 Martin Luther King, Jr. 220 “Peace Be Still” 59–63 Civil War 15, 20, 22, 36, 225, 228 See also pre-Civil War Era Clark Carlson, Beverly 91 Clarke, John Henrik 395–6 classism 206–8, 410 See also social class Clemmons, Ithiel Conrad 190–3 Cleveland, James 59 commercial success 67 early life and career 63–6 “Free Spirited Baptist Churches, The” 68 Gospel Music Workshop of America (GMWA) 59, 63, 66, 67 “Peace Be Still” 59–62 later versions 67 sonic politics 62–3 sexuality 63, 67–8 Clifford, Anne 372–3 Collins, Patricia Hill 240 colonialism 154, 155 colonization movement 12, 17n10 color line 125, 126–7, 128–9, 136, 137 “Color of Feminism, The” (Williams) 370

440

Subject Index

Colored Television (Frederick) 417–29 hidden ethical injunction 428–9 missed opportunities 426–8 philosophical analysis 421–6 prehistory of 419–21 communal solidarity 227 compensatory beliefs 356 complex subjectivity 232–3 Cone, James H. 379 black liberation theology 156–8, 227–8, 229, 231, 325–6, 391–2 Black Theology and Black Power 1, 157, 226, 353 A Black Theology of Liberation 156, 238 critique 384 The Cross and the Lynching Tree 156, 261, 326 divine-human relationship 383 God as liberator of the oppressed 381–2 God of the Oppressed 157, 203 racism 362 Speaking the Truth 244 Spirituals and the Blue, The 364n24 Theology and Black Power 157 view of God 380–1 violence 244 conjure 28, 61 conscientization 331 consciousness 141 double consciousness 232 false consciousness 327 Copeland, M. Shaw 95–7, 160–1 covenantal unity 297 Cross and the Lynching Tree, The (Cone) 156, 261, 326 crossroads theology 291–2 Crowd in the French Revolution, The (Rude) 231 Crowder, Stephanie Buckhanon 198 crucifixion 200–1 Crummell, Alexander 13 culture 133–4 Daly, Mary 369 dance 172, 187, 189 Dancy, John 38–9 darkness and lightness 130–1, 230

Davis, D.H. Kortright ecumenism 302, 303, 304–5, 306, 307–8 Emancipation Still Comin’ (Davis) 406 professional life 310–11n10 Day, Keri 208 deep symbols 158 Delany, Martin 13 Deleuze, Gilles 341 destructive suffering 361 Deuteronomic school 106, 107 diaspora. See African diaspora; Caribbean diasporan theology dignity 10–11, 15 dis-rupture, politics of 51–2 divine presence 386–7 divine racism 354, 355, 356 Domingo, W.A. 410 Dorsey, Thomas A. 64 double consciousness 232 Douglas, Charles 409 Douglas, Kelly Brown 121, 290–2, 330, 370 Douglass, Frederick 19 Down, Up, and Over (Hopkins) 384–5 dreams 28 dualism 153, 226 DuBois, W.E.B. African religious tradition 229 black aesthetic 320 Caribbean intellectuals 411 double consciousness 232 early African American religion 183 Marcus Garvey 410 Negro church 246 racial hierarchies of authority 49 Dunn, Richard S. 405 ecumenical activity 304 ecumenical engagement 308 ecumenical movement 298–300 ecumenical vision 301–3, 305–6, 308–9 racism 306–8 ecumenism 297–8, 304–5 education 91–2, 93–4, 250–1, 289 educational institutions 77 election 1876 36, 43n11 election 1894 36 election 1896 36–7 election 1898 37–40 election 2017 45n27

Subject Index Elijah 276 Emancipation Still Comin’ (Davis) 406 emancipatory politics 51–6 politics of dis-rupture 51–2 politics of inversion 52–3 politics of subversion 53–4 politics of transcendence 54–5 embodiment 200–1, 289–91 See also body emergent black community 40 Emergency Politics (Honig) 49 emigration 12 Enlightenment 311n11, 315 Episcopal Church 304, 308 Erskine, Noel 405 eschatology 213–21 God Struck Me Dead (Johnson) 217–19 James Pennington 215–17 Martin Luther King, Jr. 219–21 essentialism 232, 235n48 Estevan 23 ethical matrix 293 ethics 239–41 African American theological production 242–4 See also African American Christian Ethics ethnic suffering 355–6 Evangelical educational institutions 77 evangelical movement 14 Evangelicalism 73, 74, 78, 79, 86 evangelicalism 73–86 African American evangelicalism 73 Circle Church 82–5 John Perkins 79–82 Tom Skinner 78–9 intersection of the black church with 74–6 National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA) 76–8 sociological characteristics 73–4 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (Baldwin) 257–8 Exodus 227–8 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi 129 Ezekiel 274 Fackenheim, Emil 379, 380–1, 382–3, 384 faith identity 287, 289

441

false consciousness 327 fantastic, hermeneutic of the 49, 50, 52–3 Fantastic, The (Todorov) 49 Farley, Edward 158 Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC) 299–300 Feinberg, John S. 362 Felton, Rebecca L. 38 Female Face of God in Auschwitz, The (Raphael) 385–6 feminism. See black feminism feminist theologies. See white feminist theologies Ferguson, Missouri 139–40 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin) 190 Floyd-Thomas, Juan M. 407 Fluker, Walter 332 folk religion 92–3 Foucault, Michel 154 Franklin, Aretha 65–6 Frederick, Marla. See Between Sundays (Frederick); Colored Television (Frederick) “Free Spirited Baptist Churches, The” 68 freedom 11, 154, 422 See also black liberation theology; liberation Frick, Frank S. 108, 109 Fry Brown, Teresa 272 Fugitive Blacksmith, The (Pennington) 215, 216 fulfillment 263–4 Full Circle (Mains) 82 Fusion politics 36 future expectations 214 Garvey, Marcus 407–8, 410 gender 174–5 See also sexual-gender injustice Gilkey, Langdon 135 Gilroy, Paul 61–2 Giovanni, Nikki 67 Glaude, Eddie, Jr. 248–9, 323, 332 global city 427 globalized identity 406 gnosticism 41 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) 188, 189

442

Subject Index

God as all-seeing, all-knowing 217–19 as commanding presence 382–3 concepts of 380 divine-human relationship 383 humans as co-workers with 219–21, 385 imago dei 153–5 as impartial judge 215–17 Is God a White Racist? (IGWR, Jones) 353–8, 384 as liberator of the oppressed 380–1 lightness and darkness 130–1, 230 as mother 177 race relations 135–7 “God is a Negro” 229–30 God of the Oppressed (Cone) 157, 203 God Struck Me Dead (Johnson) 172, 217–19 God talk 125–6 God’s Fierce Whimsy 370 Goldberg, David Theo 128 gospel music 68 “Peace Be Still” 59–62 later versions 67 sonic politics 62–3 spirituals 172 See also Cleveland, James Gospel Music Workshop of America (GMWA) 59, 63, 66, 67 Grant, Jacquelyn 232–3, 241 Great Migration 74–5 “Great Pax White, The” 67 Greek philosophy 130 Haile, James B., III 361–2 Hale, Janice E. 142 Hananiah 275–6, 281n9 Handy, Maisha 288–90, 292 happiness 422, 423 Harlem Community Church 409 Harlem Renaissance 315–17, 319, 320–1 Harlem Renaissance literary movement 313 Harris, James 329 Harris, Wilbur T. 325 Harrison, Hubert 409–10 haunts 28 Haywood, Garfield T. 54

Hebrew Bible 103–4 hermeneutic for 104–5 ideological conditioning 108–9 Jesus 112–13 moral heterogeneity 107–8 poverty 110–12 theological heterogeneity 105–6 Hegel, G.W.F. 418 herbalism 28 hermeneutic of the fantastic 49, 50, 52–3 of the marvelous 49, 50, 53–4 of the miraculous 49, 50, 54–5 of the uncanny 49–50, 51–2 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks 246–7 higher education 92, 93–4 Hillard, Clarence 83, 84, 85 Hiltner, Stewart 392 history 230–1 Hogue, W. Lawrence 232 Holder, Wesley S. 409 holistic spirituality 226 Hollenweger, Walter 395 Holocaust 383, 386–7 Holy Communion 198, 321 benediction 208–9 embodiment 200 politics of 204–6 practice of 206–8 ritual renewal 199–200 Holy Nazarene Tabernacle Church of the Apostolic Faith 53–4 Holy Spirit. See pneumatology Home Harlem (McKay) 410 Home Mission College Review 92 home mission societies 91 homiletics 272 homosexuality 63, 68, 161 Honig, Bonnie 49, 54 hooks, bell 232, 235n48, 367 Hopkins, Dwight N. 225, 233–4n1, 329, 380, 384–5 Howell, Nancy 372 Hoyt, Thomas L., Jr. ecumenism 301, 303, 304, 305, 306–7, 308 professional life 309–10n7 human agency 160, 221, 330–1 human consciousness. See consciousness

Subject Index human dignity 10–11, 15 human fulfillment 263–4 human intentionality 141 human oppression. See oppression humanism 354, 356–7, 358–60, 361, 407 humanity 153–4 See also black humanity humanocentric theism 356–8 Hurston, Zora Neale 185–7, 193 hymns 198, 356 “Master the Tempest is Raging” 59–60 Ibrahima, Abd Al-Rahman 24 identity 145, 287, 289, 406 ideological conditioning 108–9 “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table” 206 imago dei 153–5, 160 In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden (Walker) 369–70 Incarnation 290 inclusion 292–3, 431–2 indigenous religions 20–2, 185–7, 291 See also African traditional religions (ATR) infinite judgment 341 innocence 344 insight 141 Institutionalization Period 228–30 intellectual alliances 410–12 intentionality 141 interracialism. See Afro-Pentecostal interracialism; black-led religious interracialism; white-led interracialism Introducing Feminist Theology (Clifford) 372–3 inversion, politics of 52–3 Is God a White Racist? (IGWR, Jones) 353–8, 384 Islam 22–4 Israel 197, 214, 275, 382 Jackson, Anita 397 James, William 392 Jennings, Willie 328–9 Jeremiah 273, 274, 275–6 Jesus baptism 200, 202–3 crucifixion 200–1

443

embodiment 160, 289–90 as liberator 156 as mulatto 161–2 poverty 112–13 reimagining the life of 120–1 Jesus and the Disinherited (Thurman) 131, 391 Jesus is Dread (Beckford) 397 Jesus movement 104–5 Jewish suffering 383 Jewish Theology Emil Fackenheim 379, 380–1, 382–3 Melissa Raphael 380, 384, 385–7 Richard Rubenstein 384 jihad 23 João I 25 Johnson, Elizabeth 373 Johnson, James Weldon 177 Jones, Charles Colcock 24–5, 26 Jones, William R. 353–8, 361, 384 Jordan, Winthrop D. 129 Jordan River 197, 198 Journey to Liberation (Cannon) 239–40 Junior, Nyasha 248, 371 Just Above the Head (Baldwin) 61 justice 202 black struggle for 15–16 breaches of 287–92 God’s justice 285–6 prophetic preaching 272, 275 See also sexual-gender injustice; social justice Kant, Immanuel 155, 341 Kay, James F. 272 Kee, Alistair 397–8 Kelly Miller Smith Institute 323, 327 Kennedy, John F. 60 King, Karen 41 King, Martin Luther, Jr. assassination 66, 230 black church 306 Civil Rights Movement 60 “Gospel Festival Spectacular” 1966 62 “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” 219–21 prophetic message 324–5 public theology 243 racism 133, 279

444

Subject Index

segregation 126, 132, 134 theodicy 360 vision 127 kingdom of God 121–3, 136 knowing 141–2 See also reason Kongolese Christianity 25 Lacan, J. 343 Langston, Donna 206 Lartey, Emmanuel 396 leadership 324, 332 See also pastors Lecrae 279 “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (King) 219–21 liberalism 261 See also neoliberalism Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls (Butler) 392 liberation 244, 262–3, 423 See also black liberation theology Liele, George 26, 74 lightness and darkness 130–1, 230 liminality 52 literacy 23–4 Lonely Londoners (Selvon) 396 Lonergan, Bernard 141–2, 143, 144, 147 Long, Charles 395, 433 Lorde, Audre 369 Lord’s Supper 314–15 Los Angeles Times 183–4 loss aversion 143 Lovelace, Vanessa 247, 248, 252n9 Lowery, Eugene 272 lynchings 38, 44n17 Mains, David 82, 83, 84, 85 mainstream black community 40 Making of the English Working Class, The (Thompson) 231 Manly, Alex 38, 39 Many Faces of Evil, The (Feinberg) 362 marvelous, hermeneutic of the 49, 50, 53–4 Marx, Karl 342–3 Maryland law 1664 26 Massingale, Bryan 362–3 “Master the Tempest is Raging” 59–60

matrix of domination 367 Matthaei, Julie A. 394 May, Benjamin 356 McKay, Claude 410 McMickle, Marvin 272 medicine 28 methodological developments 225–33 Civil Rights Era 230–3 Institutionalization Period 228–30 pre-Civil War Era 225–8 middle class aspirations 262–3 middle passage 314–15, 393 millennials 240–1 Miller, Patricia Cox 34 ministry 324, 329–32 See also pastors miraculous, hermeneutic of the 49, 50, 54–5 Mis-Education of the Negro, The (Woodson) 251 missionaries 13, 24–5, 26, 74, 91–5 Missouri Compromise 13 moral dilemma 133 moral heterogeneity 107–8 morality 230, 239–41, 316 Morrison-Reed, Mark 407 Moss, Otis, Jr. 279 multi-ethnicity 83–5 music 41–2 hymns 198, 356 “Master the Tempest is Raging” 59–60 “Peace Be Still” 59–62 later versions 67 sonic politics 62–3 Pentecostalism 189, 190 rap music 279 spirituals 172 See also Cleveland, James Muslims. See Islam Myrdal, Gunnar 133 narcissism 263 narrative tradition 226–7 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 228 National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA) 76–8, 83

Subject Index National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC) 156 Negro art 320 “Negro Character as seen by White Authors, The” (Brown) 318 Negro church. See black church Negro’s God, The (May) 356 neoliberalism 63, 68–9 New Negroes 229 New Testament 173 New York Times 143, 433 Nicks, Charles H. 68 Niebuhr, Reinhold 122, 133, 297 Nobodies to Somebodies (Reddie) 397 non-institutional religious traditions 27–9 Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study 249–50 Nottage brothers 76–7 Nzinga a Nkuwu 25 Obama, Barrack 140 open church 82–3, 84 oppression 118–20, 122–3, 156, 157, 260, 301, 330 oral tradition 226–7 organic unity 297, 302, 305 organs without body (OwB) 341, 342 original sin 261 orthopraxis 301, 302 Ottoni-Wilhelm, Dawn 272 Outlaw, Lucius 159 parachurch ministries 77 Parham, Charles 75 Paris, Peter 337 pastoral theology 392 pastors 335–7 chief executive office (CEO) model 338–45, 346–7 non-CEO pastors 345–6 Patterson, Orlando 394 Payne, Buckner 354 Payne, Daniel Alexander 229 “Peace Be Still” 59–62 later versions 67 sonic politics 62–3 Pennington, James 215–17 Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW) 54

445

Pentecostalism 183–93 beginnings 75 as continuation of African religion 185–8, 193 early impressions 183–5 ecumenism 307, 308 as religious innovation 190–3 as religious performance 188–90 significance 170–1 See also African American Pentecostals; Afro-Pentecostal interracialism perception gap 140–1, 142 implications for human knowing 144–6 racial progress 142–4 performance 188–90 Perkins, John 79–82 personal transformation v. prophetic activism 421–4 Phaedrus (Plato) 130 Pinder, Sherrow O. 129 Pinn, Anthony B. 159–60, 358–60, 384 Plantation Church (Erskine) 405 Plato 130, 131 Plenty Good Room ((Riggs) 283–4 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 140 plurality of praxis 404–5, 406 pneumatology 169–79 Afro-Christian faith 170–1, 175–7 as critique 177–8 focal question 179 Protestant theology 173–5 sense of Spirit 171–3 soteriology 178–9 political alliances 409–10 political contextuality 244–5 political theology 201–2, 238, 249–50 politics of dis-rupture 51–2 politics of inversion 52–3 politics of religion 410–12 politics of subversion 53–4 politics of transcendence 54–5 poverty 110–12, 113, 207–8 Practical Theology for Black Churches (Andrews) 287–8 pragmatic spirituality 326 pre-Civil War Era 225–8 prejudicial behaviour 145

446

Subject Index

privilege. See racial privilege; white privilege Proctor, Samuel DeWitt 92 prophetic activism v. personal transformation 421–4 prophetic eschatology 214, 215, 219–21 Prophetic Imagination, The (Brueggemann) 272–3 prophetic practical theology 287–8 prophetic preaching 271–3 African American 277–80 Hebrew prophets 273–6 prophetic principle 89 prophetic tradition 324–5 leadership 332 ministry 329–32 theology 325–9 See also prophetic preaching: African American prosperity gospel 428–9 prosperity preachers 280 Prosser, Gabriel 26 Protestantism 48, 173–5 Proverbs 107 psychology 392 public theology 89, 90 Howard Thurman 92–5 M. Shaw Copeland 95–7 Samuel DeWitt Proctor 92 quietism 356 Raboteau, Albert J. 14 race as a deep symbol 158–9 and prejudicial behaviour 145 as social construction 128–9 Race, Gender, and Work (Amott and Matthaei) 394 race relations 135–7 racial becoming 154–5 racial hierarchies of authority 49, 55 racial identity 145 racial integration 83–5 See also Afro-Pentecostal interracialism; black-led religious interracialism racial privilege 49 See also white privilege

racial progress 142–4 implications for human knowing 144–6 racial segregation. See segregation racism 49 confrontation of religion and 95–7 cultural conditioning 133–4 ecumenism 298–300, 306–8 evangelicalism 79 God talk 125–6 Is God a White Racist? (IGWR, Jones) 353–8, 384 lightness and darkness 130–1 missionaries 92 perception gap 140–1 revelation 117–18 role of the church 131–3 and sexism 232–3 skin color 126–8 as social construction 410 spiritual nurturing of 134–5 white church 362–3 white feminism 373, 374 radical inclusion 292–3 rap music 279 Raphael, Melissa 380, 384, 385–7 reason 153–6 See also knowing Reavis, Ralph 91 Reclaiming Theodicy (Stoeber) 361 reconciliation 244 Reconstruction 35–7 Reddie, Anthony 397 reference points 144, 146 repentance 202–3 resilience 16 revelation 117–24 coming kingdom 121–3 life of Jesus 120–1 scope of 118–20 righteousness 202 ritual renewal 199–200 Robert Glasper Experiment (RGE) 41–2 Roberts, J. Deotis 226, 227, 230, 238, 244 Robinson, Eugene 40 Roman Catholic Church 298–9 royal ideology 109 ruach 174–5 Rubenstein, Richard 384

Subject Index Rude, George 231 Russell, Helen Tallon 372 Said, Omar Ibn 24 Saiving Goldstein, Valerie 368–9 Salih Bilali 24 salvation 33–4 election 1898 39–40 during Reconstruction 35–7 in the Trump era 40–2 See also soteriology Sartre, Jean-Paul 354–5, 357 Savage, Barbara 245, 246 Sawyer, Mary 299 scholasticism 141 Scott, Paul 202 secular humanism 356–7 segregation 51, 132–3, 134, 140, 206, 407 self-love 263 self-transcendence 141–2 Selvon, Sam 396 Sermon on the Mount 398–9 sexism 232–3, 241 sexual-gender injustice 283–4, 288–90 sexuality 63, 67–8, 161 Seymour, William J. 51, 75, 171, 173 Shekhinah 385–7 shouting 172, 187 signs 28 Simmons, Furnifold M. 37, 38 skin color 126–8, 129 lightness and darkness 130–1 Skinner, Tom 78–9 Slade, Peter 81 slave revolts 12 slave trade 20–1, 314–15, 319 slavery. See chattel slavery Smith, Archie, Jr. 327 Smith, Kelly Miller, Sr. 324–5 Smith, Yolanda 289 social class 206–8, 262–3 See also classism social control 394 Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) 143, 145–6 social justice 202, 331–2 social justice leadership 332 social media 199, 250 social status 205

447

solidarity 227 Solomon, Job Ben 24 songs hymns 198, 356 “Master the Tempest is Raging” 59–60 “Peace Be Still” 59–62 later versions 67 sonic politics 62–3 spirituals 172 sonic politics 62–3 soteriology 178–9 soul 153, 154 spaces of correlation 25, 30n23 Speaking the Truth (Cone) 244 spirit 418, 421, 424 spirituals 172, 206 Spirituals and the Blue, The (Cone) 364n24 Stand Your Ground (Douglas) 330 Stephens, Michelle 406 stereotypes 318–19 Stoeber, Michael 361 strong humanism 358, 359 subjective experience 145 subjectivity 232–3 subversion, politics of 53–4 suffering 355–6, 360–3, 383, 387 symbolism 127–8, 275 deep symbols 158 Tales of Two Plantations, The (Dunn) 405 Teel, Karen 161 televangelism. See Colored Television (Frederick) theodicy 353, 356, 361 theological heterogeneity 105–6 theological training 250–1 Theology and Black Power (Cone) 157 Thomas, Frank 272 Thompson, E.P. 231 Thurman, Howard 92–5, 131, 391, 393 tikkun 386 Tillich, Paul 63, 125–6, 135 Todorov, Tzvetan 49, 50 Townsend Gilkes, Cheryl 240 transcendence, politics of 54–5 transcendent black community 40 transformative suffering 361 Trinitarian Pentecostals 77 Trinitarian pneumatology 385

448

Subject Index

Trump, Donald 34, 43n3 Turman, Eboni Marshall 240–1 Turner, Henry McNeal 229 Turner, Nat 26, 172 uncanny, hermeneutic of the 49–50, 51–2 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 257–8 Underground Railway 12 understanding 141, 142 United Kingdom 395–7, 398 United States Race Riot Commission 129 Urbana Mission Conference 79 Vesey, Denmark 26 violence 242–4, 285–6, 394 Voice of Calvary Ministry (VOCM) 80, 81 Voice of Missions 229 Waddell, Alfred Moore 39 Walker, Alice 369–70 Walker, Theodore 41 Walters, Alexander 33, 34, 35–6, 40 Walton, Jonathan 428–9 Ware, Frederick 217 Ware, Frederick L. African American theology 403–4 ecumenism 301–2, 303, 304, 305–6, 307, 308 professional life 310n8 Warnock, Raphael 330–1 Washington Post 140 Watch Night 297, 309n3 Watch This! (Walton) 428–9 Watkins, Ali 392 Watkins, Carol 392 Watkins-Owen, Irma 408 weak humanism 358 West, Cornel 245 West, Traci 371 West African Christianity 25 West African Islam 22–3 West African religions 20–2, 291 white aesthetic 316–17 white church 362–3 white Evangelicalism 73–4, 78, 79 white feminist theologies 368–9 engagement with black womanist theologies 371–5

white privilege 117–18, 121, 122 See also racial privilege white Protestantism 48, 51 white supremacy 15, 258–9, 326, 330, 410 9/11 attacks 96 Charleston Nine 204 Donald Trump 34, 42 election 1898 37, 39 male superiority 240, 315–16 white Protestantism 48, 51 Whiteanity 354 Whitehead, Alfred North 131, 135 white-led interracialism 47 whiteness 126–8, 258–9, 291 and culture 134 Enlightenment 315 and God 136 role of the church 131–3 v. blackness 232 v. darkness 130, 230 Why, Lord? (Pinn) 358, 384 Williams, Delores S. 197, 370, 384 Williams, Richard N. 251 willing 153–5 Wilmington, North Carolina 36, 37–40 Wilmore, Gayraud S. 191, 237 Wilson, William J. 49 Windrush generation 394, 395–6 Wisdom books 107, 111 womanism 252n9, 370 Womanist Theological Ethics (Cannon) 239 womanist theology 157, 239–41, 245, 247–8, 370–1 white feminist theologies’ engagement with 371–5 womanists 369–70 women Holy Nazarene Tabernacle Church of the Apostolic Faith 53–4 Jewish Theology 385–6 See also black women Women’s Movement 368, 369 Woodson, Carter G. 251 Wright, N.T. 201 YHWH 106 Žižek, Slavoj 335, 339, 341, 429