Word Count 5444
The Story is Still Happening: Themes of Resistance and Resilience in
Black Theology in the United States
Introduction
Written into our paper topics and defining questions for this year’s study is the assumption that the theme of “African Theology” is an ambitious one in its scope. It has been noted that it is impossible to speak briefly or simply to the great diversity of traditions and history that are reflected in such a theme.
This will again be true of this paper’s topic. I chose to narrow my area of focus a bit for the sake of some depth, and in this paper, I focus mainly on black theology as expressed in the evolving black religious experience in the United States. I make note of the profound influence of African religions in the development of black theology, as well as scholars who point toward Afrocentrism as a resource for black theological discourse. However, the majority of the examples and scholars noted deal specifically with black theology in a U.S. context.
In addition to beginning by offering the limitations of the study’s scope, I feel it important to also to mention the limitations of the author. As a white writer with very little experience in the black church tradition or with scholarship surrounding black theology, I am certain that there are important figures and ideas that I have simply missed. I anticipate in advance that there will be inadequacies, mistakes, and some unexamined bias built into my very approach to the material at times. I offer the following paper with gratitude for the chance to explore, grow in my awareness, and help facilitate good conversation among our colleagues.
Terms
Regarding resilience, it seems appropriate that in this discussion, we adopt a broader definition than simply the ability to bounce back in the face of difficulty. It includes this, but for the purposes of this paper, resilience also includes the experience of being in relationship with something life giving and also having direct knowledge and experience of one’s worth that provides the strength necessary to engage in resistance.
Resistance itself takes many forms in African theology and black theology in America. When I speak of resistance, I mean a spectrum of internal and external positions that include an inability to accept a currently reality as is, subversive thought that uses the tools of oppression for other means, and explicit outward resistance that changes the physical conditions of oppression and seeks liberation in earthly form. All resistance, though, includes an explicit communication of what is and an unwillingness to accept it.
Black Theology is Resistance by Definition
Black theology is defined by resistance both in its formation and its function. The last few hundred years of African and black theology were forged in the context of slavery and colonialism, and theyserve to place a particular people and their experience at the center of an ongoing story of God’s work in the world. This liberative work requires resistance to systems of oppression and spiritual sustenance for those doing liberation. Resistance and resilience are built into the fabric of what it means to talk about black theology.
In his book, Prophetic Rage: A Postcolonial Theology of Liberation, Johnny Bernard Hill asserts that in addition to the physical conditions of oppression, nihilism has remained one of the largest obstacles to the black community. There is outward oppression itself to fight, and there is the inner battle to make meaning in a world that dehumanizes you and devalues your life.[1]In such settings, any sustained, organized meaning making is an act of resistance.
In speaking of black theology, scholar Dwight N. Hopkins is correct in pointing out that there can be no monolithic simple understanding of what it is.However, in offering definitions, Hopkins does affirm that the term “black theology” itself refers to systematic work done post-World War 2, influenced heavily by the work of James Cone. Hopkins notes:
…in 1969, black theology received its first coherent theological book with Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power. Cone argued that the heart of the Christian message was liberation of the poor, who struggled against concrete structures preventing them from attaining their full humanity. And, pursuing this new liberation theology logic, he claimed that the American black-power movement was actually the Gospel of Jesus Christ.[2]
Hopkins and others note that so much of black theology in the contemporary setting is influenced by or offering response to Cone’s work.
While one cannot properly speak of “black theology” as one thing, there are common themes related to resistance and resilience that cut across the eras of black religious experience in the U.S. When discussion such themes, Dennis W. Wileyaffirms, “If the question is, “Who is God, according to black theology?” the three major answers offered here are (1) God takes sides, (2) God is a liberator, and (3) God is black.”[3]
In what follows, I take up these themes as they relate to general understandings of God, salvation, and Jesus in the black theological tradition. In each, it will be demonstrated that resistance and resilience are at the heart of major theological concerns in black theology.
Who is God? - God “Takes Sides”
The nature of God is important to an understanding of how resistance shows up in black theology in the United States. In its early context of slavery, the black religious experience was resistance against death and brutality. It was (and many would claim still is) a survival theology.
Hill points tothe scholarship of Albert J. Raboteauto aid in understanding what the God and religious practice of those enslaved persons looked like. There were explicit performances of religious practice that happened under the watch of slave-owners and other whites, as well as more subversive and secretive forms of religious practice which presented more authentically the influences of West African religion that came here in the diaspora. Raboteau refers to this more secretive form of practice as the “invisibleinstitution.”To practice such a faith at all was an act of risk and struggle, as it called forth the possibility of realities outside the environment of oppression.[4]
In his scholarship, Raboteau notes some characteristics of West African religion that merged with the developing practice of Christianity for the black community. These include a benevolent creator God, a series of lessor gods more active in the world, and a very thin distinction between the realms of the sacred and secular.[5]
A God that is both immanent and transcendent soon comes to be involved in the day-to-day work, hopes, and suffering of God’s people. God can be influenced and changed by such suffering, and indeed, takes sides.[6]
For South Africans, a reinterpreted understanding of the Trinity itself is related to resisting injustice. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, highlights interdependence as a fundamental understanding of a Trinitarian God. Tutu asserts, therefore, that the highest desire for a communitarian God is not individual relationships, but rather a relationship with humans in the social and communal realm. God takes interest and is active in social outcomes.[7]
In his essay, “God,” Dennis Wiley reflects on the work of James Cone, who asserted that black theology as a discipline is less concerned with abstract notions of the Divine or questions of whether God exists. Black theology is one of a concrete God. Black theology assumes God as a given. In such unequal and violent contexts, Cone claims “blacks have no time for a neutral God,” and therefore ask, “Whose side God is on?”[8]
An assumption from the early formation of the black church in the United States to the present is that God takes the side of suffering people. The predominant biblical hermeneutic is to see the story of God’s relationship with humans as one of siding with the oppressed, in the times of the Biblical stories, and today.
In black theology in the US, it is not enough to say that God is on the side of suffering people, but that God can be identified with the suffering themselves. “God is black.”
In his 1898 article, “God is a Negro,” African Methodist EpiscopalBishop Henry McNeal Turner said:
Every race of people since time began who have 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, and why should not the Negro believe that he [or she] resembles God as much so as other people? We do not believe that there is any hope for a race of people who do not believe they look like God.[9]
When Wiley points to this as a central aspect to black theology, it is to say that while there is much variance in understanding what this claim means, almost all black theologians assert that God as identified with dark skinned people is in a literal or figurative sense, also dark skinned.
The understanding of a God who takes sides, aids in liberation, and is black is intimately tied to themes of resilience and resistance. God, by definition, desires resistance to systems of oppression, loves suffering people especially, and is present and identified in life giving ways with suffering people. Those who have been diminished take nourishment for the fight in the understanding that the “image of God” most certainly applies to them.
Soteriology –Salvation is Liberation, and the Story is Still Happening
Resistance is a necessary element of salvation in black theological tradition. Almost no word was as common in any of the resources I encountered regarding black theology as “liberation.”
Denis Wiley puts is like this:
“Liberation is the term that perhaps best defines the God of black theology and best differentiates this God from the God of white theology. Not only does this term accurately point to the liberating activity of the God of Israel, as revealed in the biblical text, but it also describes the goal for which African Americans have continually quested ever since the first twenty Africans were put ashore as indentured servants at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. It is a holistic concept that refers not simply to physical liberation, but to spiritual, psychological, emotional, social, political, and economic liberation.”[10]
For Hill, it is possible to equate liberation and salvation. He states, “Broadly speaking, a black theology of liberation says that salvation is liberation. There is no soul salvation without social and political liberation from systems of power and dominance that crush the soul and spirit.”[11]
This makes sense given the development of black theology within contexts of slavery and colonialism. If God is liberator, then God’s work is liberation. If God takes sides, then salvation depends on liberation of the oppressed. If God is black, then salvation depends on the liberation of black people. This implies, then that salvation for others, particularly white people in white supremacist systems, is also tied to the liberation of black people in the here and now. Salvation requires liberation, and liberation requires resistance.
For this to occur, individuals must face realities of suffering, become maladjusted to them and unwilling to accept them, and have viable alternatives presented. In this model, tools for salvation/liberation only become salvific if they actually speak to the realities at hand and offer a solution to them. This means that black theology calls for a liberation of people’s inner and outer lives.
In the history of black religious experience in the United States, one way that liberation and salvation have been linked is for black communities to identify themselves with the protagonists of the Biblical narrative, particularly the chosen people whom God aided in liberation in the Hebrew Scriptures. In doing so, black communities assert that God’s healing work in the world did not only happen, it is happening, and happening in them.
Take, for example, many of the spirituals sung in the context of slavery. Those singing placed themselves in the characters and settings of Biblical stories of God’s liberation. They were not simple retellings of old stories. Rather, it was an understanding thatthey, too, were seeking Moses’ freedom from bondage, they, too, were crossing the River Jordan. Such identification with the people of God in scripture was subversive.Hill notes that songs like “Steal Away to Jesus” were means of being explicit about the terrors and violence of slavery, and songs like “Go Down Moses” placed the singer in the role of God’s chosen demanding this worldly liberation.
Many are familiar with speculation that such songs also spoke with coded instructions regarding literal freedom from slavery. “Follow the Drinking Gourde,” for example, is said by some to make reference to the North Star and speak of moss that grows only on the north side of trees.
Even if such direct coded language is not present in such spirituals, a subversive act is present when identifying oneself with people that God freed. It affirms that salvation regards social and physical conditions, and that God’s salvation is still happening. It equates God’s desire for liberation with the current struggles of the oppressed.
Black theology post-World War 2 continues this identification of the black experience in the United States with the protagonists of the Hebrew Bible especially. Perhaps this is most culturally familiar in Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s final address. In it, he explicitly ties the narrative of the struggle for civil rights in America to God’s history of liberation of the Jewish people and also to stories from the New Testament. The Road to Jericho and Moses’ encounter with the Pharaoh are spoken of as if they are present events. In it all, he is clear that the call to liberation is a this-worldly affair.
It's all right to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here! It's all right to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day…[12]
In one of the most familiar passages of that address, King hits on most of these major themes of salvation in black theology.
I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land![13]
Here, as in previous black religious experience (and contemporary experience), salvation is understood as defined by liberation. God’s will is for the oppressed to be free. God’s story of work in the world is one of liberating suffering people and reordering society, and that story is still happening.
Christology - Jesus is savoir, sibling, liberator, sufferer
The person of Jesus is affected, too, by the theological themes we have discussed so far.He, too, is understood to be black, take sides, and work toward liberation in much of the black theological tradition.
From early in their time in theUnited States, descendants of the African diaspora came to see Jesus,not only as expressed by white supremacist systems, but as someone with whom black people could alsoidentify.
Jesus as sufferer: Part of the identification with Jesus comes in part, through his suffering in the biblical narrative. In his essay, “Jesus in black theology: the ancient visitor visits,” Julian Kunnie says that those “trapped by the confines of the slave cabin began identifying with the suffering and struggling Jesus of history, besieged as a poor working-class Palestinian living under the tyranny of Roman colonial occupation.”[14]
This identification with a Jesus who suffered because of colonialism and violence by the state continues through post 1960’s black theology and into the contemporary setting.
In Black Theology and Black Power, James Cone assert that Jesus can be found by identifying the suffering themselves:
If the gospel is a gospel of liberation for the oppressed, then Jesus is where the oppressed are and continues his work of liberation there. Jesus is not safely confined in the first century. He is our contemporary, proclaiming release to the captives and rebelling against all who silently accept the structures of injustice. If he is not in the ghetto, if he is not where men are living at the brink of existence, but is, rather, in the easy life of the suburbs, then the gospel is a lie.[15]
In the 1960’s, this explicit identification of Jesus as a black savoir and revolutionary was put into direct congregational form by people like Albert Cleage who served as minister at the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit and wrote a book titled The Black Messiah.[16]
The understanding of Jesus as identified with the suffering continues to deepen in the work of scholars like Kelly Brown Douglas in her book, The Black Christ, in which Jesus is further known in the explicit “struggles of poor black women.”[17]
Jesus as identified with black people is a life sustaining religious vision for those with black bodies, but it also places Jesus’ work of black liberation at the center of God’s presence in the world. Jesus cannot be black without also embodying resistance.