431 - Ritual, Drama, and God in Black Religion: Theological and Anthropological Views

Ritual, Drama, and God in Black Religion:
Theological and Anthropological Views
By Robert C. Williams

"…there is some Eternity even in our ephemeral lives, only it is very difficult for us to discover it alone."
--Nikos Kazantzakis
in Zorba the Greek

"A good interpretation of anything--a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society-takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. When it does not do that, but leads us instead somewhere else … it may have its intrinsic charms: but it is something else than what the task at hand … calls for…. The anthropological study of religion is therefore a two-stage operation: first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion proper, and, second, the relating of these systems to socialstructural and psychological processes."
-Clifford Geertz
in The Interpretation of Cultures

"If our life lacks brimstone, i.e., a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe, our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force... [F]or far from believing that man invented the supernatural

Robert C. Williams is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He received his doctorate from Columbia University and teaches in the areas of philosophy of religion, American and African philosophy, and the interface between literature and philosophy. In 1979-1990, he served as a visiting faculty scholar in philosophy at Harvard University; and in 1980-1981, he served as Assistnat Director of International Research, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, D.C. He has published in several journals and books, and currently is completing a book, Survival and Symbol: An Essay in the Philosophy of Religion.

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and the divine, I think it is man's age-old intervention which has ultimately corrupted the divine within him…. Drama is the mind's most perfect expression. It is in the nature of profound things to clash and combine, to evolve from one another. Action is the very principle of life."

-Antonin Artaud
in The Theatre and Its Double

INSIGHTS from Kazantzakis, Geertz, and Artaud comprise a point of departure for the study of religious practice in general, and of the black religion phenomenon in particular. If eternity is "difficult to discover alone," as Kazantzakis writes, and if Geertz is right that a really good interpretation of religious reality renders explicit "an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion proper," then to consider the things vital to life as pertinent only "in their imagined form" is an unwarranted "intervention" which will do no more than ensure a "corruption of the divine within" us (Artaud). Thus, God should never be conceived through the medium of some rationally neat or imagined form wholly unrelated to religious practice; and the ritual undertaking should never be reduced to a mere social expression when divination and divinity are its instances of power.

Yet, when theological claims are adjudicated apart from worship or ritual, and when anthropological practitioners persist in the explication of the mystery of religion by employing only functionalist or social-structural theories of meaning and human behavior, it becomes almost impossible to mount an interpretation that will allow one to penetrate into the very heart of that which is the object of interpretation. By not utilizing the insights derived from each other, theology and anthropology have suffered.

In the main, anthropology has been too concerned with description and social analysis of ritual practices, and theology too often has functioned as a critical, verbal modality for the explication of the God-reality. Within the bounds of ritual practice, theology and anthropology have not pursued their respective tasks as creatively and relentlessly as the situation would allow. Most theological reflection today, for example, does not relate God to ritual practices,¹ and there are too few instances in the present-day anthropological interpretation of ritual which treat its symbolic and noetic dimensions in relation to the reality of God.² Accordingly, theology is weakened when its reflection is unrelated to ritual (that is, to religious practices) and the anthropological

¹ See Ronald L. Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 267-270.
² Clifford C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 90, 125.

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interpretation of religion is impoverished when its social - structuralist account of ritual is unrelated to the meaning of divinity.

My view is that theology's recurring responsibility is to relate its interpretations of God to ritual practice. Also, it seems that anthropology's emergent opportunity is to begin to concern itself with an analysis of God when interpreting ritual phenomena. In other words, I believe that a concern for the ways in which ritual practice and the God-reality interface will enhance the central claim of theology as well as anthropology's account of religion. It is possible that with respect to the ritual phenomenon, anthropologists and theologians have understandings of reality (different though they be) which they can profitably share with each other. Hopefully, this possible sharing between anthropologists and theologians will point the way to more reliable accounts of religion.

RITUAL AND RELIGION

Ritual is a potent form of action. It is religion in action, and, as such, ritual is the means by which religion achieves what it sets out to do. In short, ritual is primary for religion. As the most important phenomenon of religion, ritual is an orderly means by which one participates in the simulation, and sometimes the investigation, of reality. Ritual is differentiated from, though linked to, mythic and belief structures.

In the case of ritual, there is no one place or vantage point at which to begin an assessment or investigation of it, simply because ritual is a field of interlocking forces. Human beings, as ritual agents, quest for resolution and relief, participate in a field of meaning, by means of right action, exteriority, and the embodiment of a special mystery. In this connection, symbolic or ritual actions, more than, say, a textual expression or a verbal orientation, define and gesticulate the vital dimension of reality. Ritual actions really embody and account for the problematic which is lived, practiced, and experienced. Ritual portrays "a symbolic resolvement of the conflicts which external environment, historical experience, and selective distribution of personality types have caused to be characteristic in … society."³

Within anthropology, ritual is delineated almost always with respect to its instrumental character. Kluckhohn's psychological summary is a good example: "Ritual is an obsessive repetitive activity--often a symbolic dramatization of the fundamental 'needs' of the society, whether 'economic', 'biological', 'social', or 'sexual'."⁴ Ritual, as "a symbolic dramatization of fundamental needs," conveys the sense of a procedure or plan whereby certain benefits are derived from a ritual or symbolic undertaking. If, for example, it is assumed, as among the Dinka, that an illness is caused by a moral problem, then the healing process must be related to this problem. Lienhardt reports a ritual

³ Clyde Kluckhohn, "Myths and Rituals: A General Theory," Harvard Theological Review 35 (1942): 79.
⁴ Ibid., p. 78.

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procedure associated with healing:

The patient is led to focus upon one among possibly many latent elements in his experience or the experience of his kin which give rise equally to bodily sickness and uneasy conscience. Confession, by which the wrongful acts of the self are made present to it and to the community, is therefore often part of the Dinka way of dealing with sickness. When the affective condition is imagined in Power, both its grounds and the reason for it become manifest not only to him but to those who care for him, and his experience is represented in a form in which it can be publicly understood and shared.⁵

Once the grounds for this patient's suffering are recognized, the Dinka work to separate or cut the power from the sufferer by placing the sufferer's guilt "upon the back" of a sacrificial victim. This power or divinity is cast off and the sufferer, through the symbolic or ritual dramatization of his problem, is, relieved of his burden and begins his healing or restoration.

Within black religion, as expressed in its African and Afro-American forms, ritual is almost always associated with moral conflict and social problems. The salvation or resolution, which comprises the goal of ritual practice, relates to human conflict and social problems. Through black religion, ritual, drama, and the power of divinity are correlated.

If one takes seriously Victor Turner's recent advice to colleagues in anthropology, there might then be a way to discern how the acts of God are grounded in the ritual acts of human beings. His proffered counsel is to that the cognitive, affective, and volitional elements of social existence are intertwined. He asserted that these elements are all primary, that they are rarely expressed in their pure form, and that they are only comprehensible as lived experience.⁶ By using Turner's advice, the relational force of ritual and belief in God can be understood within cultural contexts, fields of individual experience, symbolic functions, and forms of human action which display an openness to the future. The "lived experience" to which Turner calls our attention, and for which the genre of drama is of singular importance, entails the experience of the observer as well as that of the observed. Ritual and belief are "only comprehensible by the investigator as lived experience, his/hers, as well as in relation to, theirs."⁷

Thus, a viewing of ritual and God as bonded within a reflexive understanding exposes some of the limited viewpoints of our own ordinary ways of thinking (for example, that the forms of thought employed by theologians are primarily passional and fideistic and that anthropologists tend to think in empirical terms). Turner's counsel can be used to urge one to look beyond traditional anthropological accounts.

⁵ R. G. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 152-153.
⁶ Victor Turner, "Dramatic Ritual/ Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology," A Crack in the Mirror, Jay Ruby, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 84-85.
⁷ Ibid., p. 84.

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Interpretative and ethnographic efforts could be structured toward generating plausible accounts of social life by using the dramatic form. When anthropologists employ drama at the level of structuring the ethnographic report, they are cast in the role of a play-maker, a homo ludens. This approach dictates that the data of ethnography contribute to the creation of "convincing playscripts" and reports as structured in the form of ethnodrama.⁸ Turner explains:

Where social dramas do find their cultural "doubles" (to reverse Antonin Artaud) in aesthetic dramas and other genres of cultural performance, there may well develop, as Richard Schechner [a professor of drama] has argued, a convergence between them, so that the processual form of social dramas is implicit in aesthetic dramas (even if only by reversal or negation), while the rhetoric of social dramas-and hence the shape of argument-is drawn from cultural performances. There was a lot of Perry Mason in Watergate!⁹

The phrase "a convergence between social dramas and aesthetic dramas" is intriguing when applied (as Turner does in his essay on dramatic ritual and ritual drama) to anthropology.

If human action, in the form of a planned and repetitive locomotion of the body, is a means by which some nagging problems are resolved, then the best commentary on, or the successful interpretation of, ritual is a form of action and re-presentation that is parallel to the ritual enactment itself. Motion, drama, enactment, as employed by devotees of black religion, are vehicles for making contact with God and of attaining personal-social goals identified with the reality and will of the deity.

AFRICAN RELIGION

What is religion to the African and how is it grounded in the traditional African experience? First, religion is all-pervasive with respect to human experiences. Secondly, at every point in the universe of African reality, the person is in contact with life forces that are expressed by means of God, spirits, ancestors, natural objects, even the universe itself. Among the Yoruba people of Nigeria, for example, the orishas or gods, are numerous, and as such, they act via ritual practice to order human life. In some cases, they are personifications of physical force as well as natural phenomena. Thus, traditional religious practices in Africa (for example, non-Christian, non-Islamic, and non-Jewish structures) are grounded in life: in will and vitality as the ultimate reality of existence. In religious matters, Africans exist and search for meaning as well as the resolution of conflict. They undertake such searches as they are ritualistically and actually involved with changing and moving concerns of life.

Accordingly, African scholar Mbiti observed:

Wherever the African is, there is his religion: he carries it to the field where he

⁸ Ibid., pp. 83-84.
⁹ Ibid., pp. 84, 85-86.

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is sowing seeds or harvesting a new crop; he takes it with him to the beer party or to attend a funeral ceremony … to the house of parliament…. Everybody is a religious carrier. So then, belief and action in African traditional society cannot be separated; they belong to a single whole.¹⁰

The single whole is an expression of a universe that is dynamic and in flux, a living and event-filled universe.¹¹ The power of the universe is ultimately from God, even when there are instances of power being derived from, and conveyed through, lesser spiritual beings and natural objects. Hence, within this world of sacred objects and forces there is a continuity expressed with respect to the varied and differentiated aspects of life. This continuity is found in ritual practices and includes community and communal responsibility, along with a sense of the nearness of ancestors as well as a strong tic to the activity of various gods.

For the African, the cosmos is the place where a special quality or sacred power influences everything. Through sacrifice, divination, or the intensity of the dance, the consciousness of a devotee can be so transformed that the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary worlds becomes blurred. For example, with the rhythm of drums, persons can literally dance in order to tap divine power; that is, persons can "dance out their desires" until they are "mounted by a god" and 16 come into possession" of a special identity, power, or consciousness. Dance among Africans is sometimes a ritual technique used to discern the will or intention of a god, a technique employed to ensure that order is maintained or a fundamental conflict is resolved. Ritual, as in the If a divination of the Yoruba, invokes a sacred time through which assistance from a god is used to handle ordinary concerns and problems.

In initiation rites, for example, ritual practice embodies passage, as in the transition from "one culturally defined state or status to another." ¹² Hence, as Mbiti comments:

Initiation rites have many symbolic meanings, in addition to the physical drama and impact …. [as ritually centered in] the experience of the process of dying, living in the spirit world and being reborn (resurrected). [They] have a great educational purpose …. the beginnings of acquiring knowledge which is otherwise not accessible to those who have not been initiated.¹³

So, in a few words, ritual practices in Africa are central to religion, and in this respect, ritual is structured around such primary aspects of existence as fertility, healing, ordeals, and oath-taking, purification, accession to office, funerals, initiation, sacrifice, and new year celebrations each of which is construed to relate to the on-goingness of

¹⁰ J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophies (New York: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 2, 5,
¹¹ Ibid., p. 264.
¹² Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 164-166, 177-178, 183-185. For example, in ritual "liminality," persons who exist on a structurally inferior plane "aspire to a symbolic structural superiority" (p. 203).
¹³ Mbiti, pp. 158, 159.

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communal life. But each primary aspect of existence is believed to be oriented to a power that can be disclosed by the vehicle of ritual. Through certain ritual practices, the Dogon believe that they can take control of the world. Moreover, they believe that they can renew the life and substance of their world-by means of the repeating of certain ritual acts; that is, such acts can restore balance in the total cosmos by mediating the original opposition between order and disorder.¹⁴ In addition, for the Dogon, ritual is a means of adjustment, an important mechanism of social control rooted in mystical belief and taken as an effective means of purging animosities and strife.¹⁵ Interestingly, mystical power or agency is believed to be centered in witches, sorcerers, ancestral spirits, and other life forces, and ritual is used, more often than not, to remedy wrongs and to assuage other spirits that may endanger the living.¹⁶ We may conclude, with Victor Turner, that moral discomfort is felt by the African when facing misfortune, and rituals are the means of dramatizing the conflict as well as the continuity, remedy, or the new balance that is sought.

Certain common elements or features surface in African religion with respect to ritual. These features are a sense of community, a sense of the activity of intermediary gods, a relatedness to ancestors, and a belief in the non-involvement of the high God. Thus, salvation for the traditional African (as also for a great many Afro-Americans) is a present reality. Salvation, or the resolution of social conflict, is not grounded in a future event. Salvation-by means of the drama and power of ritual practices--is an event which occurs in the here and now. In essence, the salvation event, as mediated by means of African ritual, recreates and re-establishes human experience in the present time. Religion, thus, is a significant part of the African's moral life, and the use of divination as well as the appeal to deities is a real part of belief and the reinforcement of order in social life. Given this state of affairs, theological accounts of God in Africa need to consider ritual practice, and anthropological interpretations of ritual ought to include an analysis of divinity vis-a -vis beliefs.

AFRO-AMERICAN RELIGION

The Afro-American religious reality can be viewed in two parts or cultural movements: first, the religious ethos as developed by the slaves before the Civil War, and second, the black religious sensibility as shaped by the urban environment and the black power movement. Within the first movement, an experience with God in the context of religious ritual was the focus of faith and practice; whereas, in the

¹⁴ M. Griaule, Conversations with Ogtemmeli, (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). Cf. Benjamin C. Ray, African Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 24-32.
¹⁵ Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (New York: A Mentor Book,1968),pp.250-257.
¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 251, 262.

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second movement, God's relevance and presence is related more to political engagement and socio-economic liberation. One significant deposit or account of the feeling tone and dramatic character of Afro-American religion is contained in the language and imagery employed by illiterate ex-slaves in reflecting upon religion during the experience of bondage.

(1) The Ethos of Slave Religion. The publication of God Struck Me Dead, a collection of primary resource materials on religion by ex-slaves and about slave religion, revealed that the ecstatic experience of meeting God and of being born again had meaning for slaves only within the bounds of ritual or dramatic worship. During slavery, the practice of religion was the one area where slaves had a modicum of freedom. "Only in an -i-nner world (supported by ritual] could the … [slaves] develop a scale of values and fixed points of vantage from which to judge the world around them and themselves."¹⁷ The inner world of religion and ritual practice fostered a "new individuation" and an "inward reintegration," which suggests that the Christian God and Christian symbolism were among the tools used by slaves to build for themselves a world of involvement and meaning.

Hence, contrary to much speculation concerning compensatory religion, slaves were "more interested in finding an adequate and full expression for their emotional life in this world than in preparing for glory in the next." ¹⁸ They used what was available to them, the Christian God and its concomitant ritual means, for ordering an otherwise chaotic and brutal life. They used, more or less in a piecemeal fashion, aspects of ritual practice and religious awareness from their African past. Yet, within the excitement and creativity of the religious moment, of religious freedom, the antebellum slaves were not converted to the Christian God. Rather, it appears that they converted the Christian God to themselves. "In the Christian God [the slave] found a fixed point, and he needed a fixed point, for both within and without himself, he could see only vacillation and endless shifting."¹⁹ To come to terms with the brutal flux and dehumanizing onslaught of slave existence, the slave shaped a ritual scheme and a view of God which afforded courage and generated the will to live and hope.

The religion of the slave community was instutionalized in a ritual process that was dramatic in character, that was influenced by the shout, and that was the means by which conversion and God were experienced. Slaves worshipped God and used the force of worship to relate to their suffering. They thus were enabled to follow a more or less orderly means of ritually seeking solutions to their personal problems. In short, "the cultural and institutional context [of religion] provided an

¹⁷ C. Johnson and A.P. Watson, eds., God Struck Me Dead (Philadelphia and New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1969), p. vii.
¹⁸ Ibid., p. xiii.
¹⁹ Ibid., p. ix.

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individual with the pattern, norm, and form through which an inner emotional struggle may have personal expression."²⁰

Bodily movement, through music and improvisational song, group dance, and the shout, comprised the dramatic dimension of worship and ritual. Freedom of expression and non-verbal celebration punctuated almost every gathering for worship. Dancers moved and swayed to the music and singing. Tensions were released and the stirring for freedom and well being were set in motion by means of the shout. As such, shouting was an outward manifestation of an inward joy. It was a spontaneous act and happened when the individual felt the spirit. Thus, an ex-slave reported: "I shout because there is a fire on the inside. When I witness the truth, the fire moves on the main altar of my heart, and I can't keep still."²¹ Through the ritual experience of worship, slaves acted out their joy and the sense of newness and freedom as found in the rebirth experience of conversion.

If the service of worship as a form of ritual was a time of joy and outward testimony, it was also conceived as being solemn. The experience of conversion invoked a note of seriousness and personal triumph. For the slave, the conversion experience occurred in a community life setting and was hedged in by ritual practice and/or worship.²² One must be born again or "hooked in the heart" before being used by God in worship. It was believed that God delivered the soul and turned the person around: "I am a time-God," one ex-slave explained. "Behold, I work after the counsel of my own will, and in due time I will visit whomsoever I will."²³ Another ex-slave rendered the following commentary on the slave experience:

Before God can use a man, the man must be hooked in the heart. By this I mean that he has to feel converted. And once God stirs up a man's pure mind and makes him see the folly of his ways, he is wishing for God to take him and use him. From this time on it is up to God…. A voice spoke to me, and it spake three times. Everytime it got nearer and nearer, until it seemed right over the top of my head. It said, "Have you ever thought where you will spend eternity?" I got sorrowful and sad and stepped out of the room and prayed. "I saw … [God] through the eye of faith and heard his voice through the spiritual ear until the heart understood."²⁴

From the above account, it is clear that God was believed to be present and active in slave rituals as prime mover and sustainer: God stirs up a human being, God speaks to the heart, and God is the controlling force in Christian ritual practice. Conversion, or the experience of being born again, comes from and is controlled by God. Most often, it occurred and was authenticated during worship-at that time in the ritual when persons felt moved to "carry their souls to the Lord" so that they could become "hooked in the heart."

²⁰ Ibid., p. xviii.
²¹ Ibid., p. 11.
²² Ibid., p. xviii.
²³ Ibid, p. 19.
²⁴ Ibid., pp. 19, 22.

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Within this type of religion, theology's reflection would have to take seriously the ethos of ritual, and anthropology's interpretation of ritual would be faced with the opportunity to take the believer's sense of the deity into account. Thus, ritual and theology should be connected. This is so because the expression of ritual is never exclusively the pursuit of certainties that may exclude doubt and rational explanation, and, too, theology is not primarily a rational search for clarity and meaning radically divorced from a background of experiences, attitudes, and assertions which are taken for granted. In the field of religion, ritual power and belief-ful actions are taken for granted.

(2) Black Theology and Ritual Practice. Ritual remained a positive force within those new expressions of Afro-American religion that developed after the 1920s and during the black power movement. However, worship and ritual in those contexts were subordinated to personal-social concerns as well as to strategies of political empowerment/liberation. The black power reality was an indicator of a proud black people-and a strident black church--come of age. Concerns articulated by black laypersons, preachers, and theologians seemingly called for a new approach to black church life: an approach influenced -by--the need to consider the cultural heritage, liturgical practice, and theology of black folks.

The black church version of Christianity had its birth in the religious practices forged by slaves in the seventeenth century. But by the 1950s almost all black persons began to recognize that racism and Christianity were opposites. Black theology addressed this dichotomy. Interestingly, in 1972, theologian James Cone reported to a group of South African readers that 'Black Theology' was relatively new to America, being essentially a phenomenon of the 1960s. His report included the following programmatic comment on black theology:

One way of describing its appearance is to say that it is the religious counterpart of the more secular term 'Black Power', which means that it is a religious explication of the need for black people to define the scope and meaning of black existence in a white racist society. While Black Power focuses on the political, social and economic condition of black people, seeking to define concretely the meaning of black self-determination in a society that has placed definite limits on black humanity, Black Theology puts black identity in a theological context, showing that Black Power is not only consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ, but that it is the gospel of Jesus Christ…. This means therefore that authentic theological speech arises only from an oppressed community which realises that its humanity is inseparable from its liberation from earthly bondage. All other speech is at best irrelevant and at worst blasphemous.²⁵

If, as was the case in the late sixties, the seventies, and now in the eighties, a concern for theology's relevance to social change dominates

²⁵ In B. Moore, ed., The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1974), pp. 48, 56-57.

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most accounts of Afro-American religion, then one may discern that there is a great distance between black ritual and black theology. What Cone advocated in his words to South Africans was that liberation is "the central motif of the gospel and one of the most creative elements of black religion." The real issue, concerning ritual, is whether this assertion by Cone is accurate with respect to the core of the black religion reality. Historian of religion, Charles Long, was quick to notice this problem with the structure of black theology.²⁶ Long's polemical questions to black theology stress images, structures, and modes of orientation related to Africa. Long's concerns are centered in questions about the nature of black religion and whether a theology that follows the course charted by European theologians can render an adequate account of the black religious experience. Issues regarding sources used in shaping black theology, the real reader to whom such a theology is addressed, as well as the shape and voice of the language utilized were asked.

Cone wrote The Spirituals and the Blues (l972)²⁷ and God of the Oppressed (1975) as attempts to come to terms with these issues. When in 1982, Cone published My Soul Looks Back, and therein called upon the black church to reclaim its liberating past, he assumed a critical posture in relation to the church and did not articulate in any explicit terms the manner in which black theology is accountable to the church or to the ritual practices of black religion. Instead, he seemed to be suggesting that both the black church and black theologies should be linked to worthy causes and human needs: for example, the plight of minorities in the United States, the goals of feminism, the program of Marxism, and the plight of dispossessed peoples in the Third World. Black theology's future existence is related to those movements which seek to bring liberation.

Thus, when assessing black theology's account of the black religion phenomenon, as it is grounded in ritual, is one to assume that most black theologians presuppose that ritual (worship) in black religion is obsolete? To be sure, the black theology project takes seriously, and rightly so, the dramatic and ritualistic dimensions of social action and political engagement concerning liberation and change, Liberation and change are proper motifs to be accented in theological claims about God. But it also seems proper to construe the God-reality in relation to ritual and worship. If now, through black liberation theology, politics is a ritual medium, then it is proper to assume that worship is also a medium (a primary modality, as existentially encountered and theoretically delineated,

²⁶ See Charles H. Long, "Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States," History of Religions, Vol. II, No. 1 (August, 1971), and his "Structural Similarities and Discontinuities in Black and African Theology," The Journal of Religious Thought, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall/Winter, 1975). Cf. Gayraud Wilmore and James Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979 (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979), pp. 615-623.
²⁷ See the review of this book by Robert C. Williams Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Winter, 1975).

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pari passu with a constructive theology) of black religious reality.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

By looking, as we have done, at the African and Afro-American religious cases, we suggest that for these two religious realities, ritual action is just as significant as are belief structures. What this suggestion implies for the work of anthropologists and theologians is that they can benefit from each other.

With what now is the proven difficulty of living on an overcrowded and problem-laden planet, it is imperative that human beings learn to share common tasks. Neither anthropology's nor theology's future will be viable if they appeal continually to forms of knowledge that are privileged or to modes of inquiry that are preferential.

Theologians must not merely write about concrete experiences and significant encounters with God. They should also write on the basis of these experiences and encounters as they are generated and preserved within the context of ritual practices. Anthropologists would be wise to structure their interpretations of ritual in such a manner that the thinking/believing phenomenon peculiar to the ritual act is what is focused -upon: that is, a thinking and a believing associated with the consciousness of the ritual participant. Obviously, these observations serve only to give us a frontier view of anthropology's descriptive work and theology's interpretative task--a view which undoubtedly, will be enriched when anthropologists and theologians join hands in examining the ritual phenomenon alongside its mythic, symbolic, and ideational components.

Anthropology's ethnographic accounts of religion face their most formidable test of legitimacy in the field (with respect, for example, to a ritual scheme that is vital and alive), and not necessarily in the debates or scientific judgments fostered by professional anthropologists. Likewise, theology faces its most severe and genuine test in the context of worship and ritual, and not necessarily in the academic world where the play of professional judgment and a conventionalized reason is controlled by scholars.

So, as regards religion and its animating force as grounded in ritual, both theology and anthropology undergo testing. They are challenged to reflect on the symbols, institutions, and actions directly associated with human beliefs and human strivings. This test for theology has to do with its responsibility to explicate faith beliefs and the reality of God in reference to the power and relevance of ritual. For anthropology, this test has to do with an opportunity it now faces: to examine ritual structures and expressions in the light of the presence of deity as well as those ritual belief claims that are grounded in divinity.

When all is said and done, the testimony of a ritual participant who firmly believes in the divinity within is perhaps what is most appealing to

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students of the black religious phenomenon:

Son, you have asked me to speak of God? Who is God? God is a spirit and seeks only those to worship him who will worship in spirit and truth. What do I mean? I mean, son, that all the reading in the world will not help you. Unless God opens up your understanding and reveals his mighty works to you, you are dead. God has promised to those who serve him eternal life. Thus, if you are dead you have no part in him.²⁸

²⁸ Johnson and Watson, p. 13.