Читать книгу New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology - Donald W. Musser - Страница 33

During the 1960s, in the midst of the outward progress made by the civil rights movement—and perhaps because of it—the face of America was changed. Much like the sinister vision of William Butler Yeats, some “rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.” In the 1960s, this event was the rise of black power. The term “black power,” as we now understand it, was first given currency by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., at a rally in Chicago in May 1965.

The term “black power” was and remains charged with tremendous emotive energy. It became the rallying cry for black nationalist groups, political radicals, and cultural revolutionaries; as such, it was the hallmark of the break between the black radical movement and the more accommodationist civil rights movement. The central intent of the black power movement was the empowerment of black people.

The need for black power was sharpened by the presence of oppression and racism. Black people historically found themselves the victims of scorn, rebuke, violence, rape, and death because of the color of their skin. This victimization, most sharply felt in slavery and continuing in subtle forms of racism and discrimination, which afflict black people today, denies the humanity of black people as equally endowed creations of God. “Black power” was the call to black people to shed those ideas of inferiority, which racial oppression fosters, and to engage in a struggle to liberate their bodies, minds, and spirits.

The cry for black power was not limited to the streets of urban America or to the “secular” radicals in the black community. It was also heard in the black churches. Many black clergy heard and responded to the anguished cry of the oppressed. For them black power posed a radical challenge to the normative notions of theology and ministry in the black community. Many of these clergy articulated the need for a theology with its focus, content, and method firmly rooted in the struggle for liberation of black people. European and American theology had never taken the suffering of black people as a serious theological issue and therefore was incapable of speaking prophetically in the midst of their oppression. Out of this vacuum black theology in its contemporary form emerged.

Black power was the political source of black theology, but black theology had a spiritual source as well—black religion drawn from the remnants of African traditional religions and slave religion. Although one can speak about these sources as distinct entities, they are inseparable. The traditional Western separation of the physical and the spiritual, the sacred and the secular, is foreign to the African American sensibility. Black religion provides black theology with a worldview and a metaphysical base from which to view the physical world and the social order. It has historically affirmed the inherent worth of black people, their dignity as creations of God even in inhumane situations, and God’s special providential care for them.

Under the circumstances of slavery and oppression in the United States, this slave religion carried with it an inescapable dimension of black radicalism. This radical religion manifested itself in a number of ways. It always sought independence from white control. The growth of slave religion itself was a spiritual form of rebellion and autonomy. The founding of the independent black churches in America was an instance of the seizure of institutional freedom. The emergence of black theology in the 1960s was a continuation of this radical tradition in the form of intellectual freedom from the canons of white theological thought. This radicalism was not limited to the black church but was seen in a variety of social and political expressions in the black community. However, because the black community did not divide the world into the sacred and the secular, the presence of the spirit of freedom in settings other than the ecclesiastical was quite consistent with the African American religious sensibility.

Black religion, especially its creative use of symbolism, gave black theology a distinct language with which to express the deepest convictions and longings of an oppressed people. Its prayers, poetry, sermons, songs, and litanies provided the context for the telling of the black story. The folklore of black people contains stories that are more than entertainment. These stories embody, in narrative form, the historical hope and eschatological confidence of black people. Black theology has always been expressed in the language of black religion and folklore. Because it emerged from the experience of black people, black theology expressed the deepest religious commitments of black people in a language they created. Therefore, black theology could not remain true to its identity and adopt the language of Europe and North America. It had to be expressed as a folk theology.

Black theology is also a biblical theology. A great deal of the religious self-understanding of black people is expressed in biblical language. This biblical language is not simply the result of black people reading and reiterating the Bible. Rather, this language has become an integral part of black self-expression. One must not underestimate the role the Bible played in the formation of the folklore of black people. Biblical images became so interwoven into the fabric of black experience that now it is almost impossible to appreciate black folklore fully without attention to the Bible. The Bible is a text that is not simply the possession of the black church; rather, it is part of the language of the black community as a whole. The Bible became so important for black people in America because in it they saw their own experiences reflected. Therefore, they understood themselves to be a part of the tradition of the faithful of history for whom the Bible was the standard by which fidelity was measured.

Black theology was nurtured in the soil of black religion and blossomed, in its present form, with the black power movement. Until its emergence virtually no attention was given to the effect that a particular social context had on the method, structure, and content of American theology. (A kind of contextual theology that focused on the ideological dimensions of theological thought was fairly well established in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.) It was assumed that theology existed outside the tensions of society, supposedly unaffected by the unjust distribution of wealth and power within society, American theologians had no real interest in the concrete issues of the creation of a more just society. American theologians did not take as their point of departure the most significant social tension in American society—racial oppression. One wonders—in light of DuBois’s prophetic statement that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color-line—how these theologians could overlook it in their work. This omission could be accounted for by examining the social origins of their theologies. Because most American professional theologians were heirs to the privileges of being white and male in American society, the race issue or the issue of gender would not enter naturally into their theological consciousness.

Black theology, however, has always been intrinsic to the struggle for black liberation. It has always been expressed in the idiom of the black community. Thus, black theology is inseparable from its social context or surroundings. This does not mean that black theology is reducible to sociology, ideology, or culture. Rather, it means that black theology is always concrete, applied in a particular situation, by a particular people, and in a particular way. Black theology addresses the question: What does the gospel of Jesus Christ have to do with the struggle of black people for liberation from white oppression?

Black theology is a theology that equates liberation with salvation. It proclaims that the gospel affirms the black quest for freedom because the gospel of Jesus Christ is freedom. The relation between Jesus and the freedom of the oppressed means that God is revealed as the One who delivered Israel out of the house of bondage, the God whom the slaves believed would liberate them, and the God who sides with the oppressed today. Christ in black theology is not the blond-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned man who appears in European-American culture and art. Christ was poor, oppressed, despised, and persecuted. Christ died the death of a slave and rose again to witness the power of God over the forces of oppression. This is the Christ of black theology. The Holy Spirit in black theology is not simply that force which compels us to lead pious lives. The Holy Spirit is the presence of God in the world. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of freedom. Black theology, in essence, is the spiritual expression of the black power movement and the political expression of African American faith.

Black theology is a church theology and a folk theology. It did not come from seminaries or divinity schools. As such it is not just an “intellectual” enterprise. This does not mean that there is no place for black theology in the academic setting; rather, it means that the criteria for its authenticity must be rooted in the black religious community. Black theology also represents the prophetic strand in African American religious thought. There are other strands within the tradition. More conservative black religionists tend to eschew the radicalism of black theology; others adopt a kind of agnosticism that sees the religion of black folk as a crutch for the weak. Both of these strands are subordinate within the tradition of black theology and almost always submit to canons of evaluation that are not drawn from the black community. Thus, for virtually all black theologians, prophetic black Christianity alone is authentic.

Black theologians acknowledge their debt to the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as to the black power movement. While King had reservations about the black power movement and its strategies for liberation, he embodied a radicalism of his own that was fully consistent with the African American religious tradition of resistance. King’s work, like that of David Walker, Sojourner Truth, and Henry McNeal Turner, is a progenitor of today’s black theology.

Although black theology is noted for its concentrated focus on the meaning of the gospel for black people, it is not monolithic. Black theology has always been a corporate enterprise. The first anguished utterances of black theology were not issued in a book-lined study but among a group of black clergy trying to make sense of the senseless suffering their people were experiencing. One of the dangers that black theologians face today is isolation from one another and from the black community. This isolation can easily happen when a black clergyman or clergywoman finds himself or herself the lone black faculty member on an otherwise all-white faculty or when an assignment takes him or her to some remote academic enclave. To counter this danger, black theologians must insist on creating opportunities for collegial work and communal witness. This is especially important because black theology is still developing. It is vital and alive. It is not a body of doctrine that has been set into stone but a way of believing that has been set in flesh. The study of black theology, then, is inquiry not into dead tradition but into living history.

In spite of the pain and alienation caused by racial oppression, black theologians, like black people in general, remain open to the possibility of God’s redemption of the oppressors. This means that black theologians are willing to engage in dialogue with other theological perspectives that seek to confront the challenge of the message of liberation in the gospel. Process theologians and theologians of hope have been among the first white theologians to engage in this dialogue. Dialogue and even coalition are possible, given prior commitment to the liberation of the oppressed.

Black theology is also applicable to the didactic or teaching ministry of the church. Black theologians have something to say to Christian educators in their churches, to college and university students in their quest for an accurate reading of black religion, and to graduate theological students. Without this applicability, black theology would be a mere pastime for seminary professors and their students.

Finally, black theology continues to define the doctrinal affirmations of African Americans. What a people confess and believe says a great deal about who they are. Without the theological attempt at self-definition, the black church would be doomed to wander without a self-identity.

Black theology is a third-world theology. It is the theological reflection of a third-world people living in a first-world nation. Black theology shares with other third-world theologies a focus on liberation as the content of the Christian gospel. Historically, black theology in the United States and Latin America liberation theology arose at about the same time. Independently of one another, these two expressions came to the conclusion that the Christian gospel was consistent with the struggle of the oppressed for their liberation. Thus, black theology is related to the majority of Latin American liberation theologies by virtue of its emphasis on praxis, concrete theological formulations, and liberation as salvation. Black theology is also the product of an African people and therefore shares with other theological expressions from the African continent and from Asian peoples a distinctive attitude toward history and religion. This perspective on the power of indigenous religion is apparent in the black folk religion, which is the religio-cultural basis of black theology.

Black theology in the United States, Latin American liberation theology, and black theology in South Africa are political theologies in the sense that they are concerned about the ordering of the world in a more just fashion. God’s righteousness is seen as the demand to bring about right relationships between members of and groups within the human family. The major obstacle to justice and peace is the continued oppression of the poor by the rich. Wealth and poverty are both actual and symbolic conditions of human life. They are the primary divisions within the human family. The term “poor” has become a political designation for those in Latin America who actually suffer the lack of material resources, as well as for those who have entered into solidarity with the poor and thereby experience, albeit in a derivative fashion, powerlessness. In black theology in South Africa, blackness and whiteness have become political designations for those who are actually classified by the government as black, as well as for those who see their destinies intertwined with their black brothers and sisters and thereby experience the effects of racial humiliation.

Black theology, African theology, and Asian theology are cultural theologies in the sense that they are concerned with the recovery and preservation of their indigenous traditions and history. The pre-Christian and non-Christian elements in both black religion and Asian religions are not seen as impediments to the full presence of Christian faith; nor are these ancient religions seen as only preparatory stages for the advent of the higher religion of Christianity. African traditional religions, their remnants in the black folk religions of the African diaspora, and the great Asian religions are vital traditions that still anchor their adherents in a positive sense of belonging to a sympathetic universe. As an African-Asian theology, black theology in the United States embodies certain tendencies and predispositions that are not traceable to any Western or European influence. This element of otherness distinguishes it from other Western theologies. In these African-Asian theologies, important topics include the nature of the primary social unit (i.e., family, clan, tribe), the social responsibilities of members of the community to care for one another, and the expansion of the concept of community to include those who are no longer living. In these theologies, culture is the basis for assessing the identity of the human group. By turning inward, so to speak, and rediscovering the inner resources in its ritual, worship, and communal life, the community may resist the deadening effects of political, economic, and social oppression. In this instance God is affirmed as One who is present in the culture of the oppressed and who is made manifest in the symbols of holiness within that culture. Because the God is an immanent God rather than a God who shuns the particularity of culture, the theology that results is cultural discourse. That is, black theology, African theology, and Asian theology focus on their cultural and religious uniqueness as a sign of God’s presence.

Theology as cultural discourse has flourished in those situations where the oppressed have suffered the religio-cultural domination of Western nations. In these instances, missionary endeavor often became the advance guard of colonial exploitation. The Western Christian churches have presented themselves as institutions that devalue the culture of the indigenous people and in many ways equate Christianity with its Western garb. It is this ecclesiastical conquest that liberation theologians oppose. The solution to this problem is for indigenous peoples to find God among themselves.

Black theology in the United States is both a global and cultural discourse. Although it shares with Latin American liberation theology and South African black theology the conviction that there is a relation between Christian faith and political praxis, black theologians also recognize the rich resources of black religion and black culture. Although black theologians share with Asian theology the conviction that there are tremendous resources for survival present in indigenous culture and religion, black theologians also recognize that culture is not synonymous with God’s revelation. At times, God acts in history to redeem and transform culture as well as society. In sum, black theology embodies within itself the dimensions of cultural discourse and global discourse. It is truly an African American theology in the sense that it struggles with the dilemma described by DuBois: participating in two communities with its identity fully grasped by neither.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century black theologians face difficult and complex tasks. They must still grapple with the issues of race that dominated the twentieth century. DuBois was correct when he noted that the twentieth century would be defined by the issue of “the color line.” Racism at the beginning of the twentieth century was not only the “Negro problem” of the American south. The outbreak of World War I in Europe with its attendant racial sub-themes, meant that it was a world problem. In the twenty-first century racism is still a problem. Its contours and subtleties have been shaped and sometimes hidden by the massive social and technological changes that have swept over the West and throughout the world. While these social and technological advances threaten to widen the gap between the black poor and the remainder of American society, the events of September 11, 2001 point to racism and ethnocentricity as, again, a world problem. The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. are linked to, among other things, the persistent power of race and ethnicity, especially when combined with religion, to resist what is perceived as oppressive power. The external terrorism of 2001 may indeed mark the symbolic beginning of the twenty-first century. However, one cannot forget that it was preceded by the internal terrorism of the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

This means that black theologians will work in a context in which many of the rules have changed, and yet, many of the problems are the same. While working on an understanding of what the Christian faith has to say in this kind of world, black theologians will need to move beyond narrow academic concerns to seek the truth wherever it may be found. They will need to move beyond narrow ecclesiastical concerns to seek faith wherever it may be practiced. While the issues of competing notions of civilization are debated on the world stage, black theologians must be concerned about the poor and especially the black poor and disenfranchised who may be simply caught up in the maelstrom of global events. They must continue to study and discuss the connections between domestic policy and international policy, between events at home and events abroad.

The twenty-first century will require that black theologians focus on the ways that the significance of race and the apparatus of racism have shifted. The meaning of racial identity and its relationship to culture should be at the top of the theological agenda. This work will require dialogue with scholars in other disciplines, workers in other professions and occupations, and, most important, with the black church, that community of Christians to whom the safeguarding of liberating faith has been bequeathed.

JAMES H. EVANS, JR.