121 - The Roots and Fruits of Black Theology

"In the midst of abiding inequality and poverty based on race, young black Christians are coming to an awareness of their task in formulating a black theology. There is a realism here which is not based on the false claim of nationalists. There is an attempt to attend the low burning fires of Christian universality, for the aim of black theology, like all Christian theology, is to bring more light and truth and action from the word."

The Roots and Fruits of Black Theology
By Joseph R. Washington, Jr.

SINCE the publication of Black Religion in 1964 (and the coining of that phrase) the debate continues as to whether there is a religion of black folk distinguishable in substance (as opposed to style) from the religion of white folk. The answer given then offended some, shocked others, and challenged a few. It is still largely true today that the religion of black folk is without guidance from an authentic theology rooted in the black experience. Fortunately, it appears that tomorrow will be different.

Until recently black theologians could rarely be found outside a black pulpit, where more often than not their theology was intuitive and oral at best, individualistic at worse. There were neither formal nor informal schools of black theologians. Each man caught his theology by accident or sheer personal development. Occasionally one could find a black man doing white theology. Less frequently one could be found doing theology (other than black of course!) in white institutions.

There are good reasons for this near absence of black theology. White people refused to encourage and nurture blacks in this exclusive intellectual club. Black people learned to take their religion straight (that is uncritically) and to prefer it. But times have changed and with it something new is emerging.

Joseph R. Washington, Jr. is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Afro American studies program at the University of Virginia. He has written several articles and books, the most recent being Black Sects and Cults (1972).

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Here and there young black men (and hopefully women) are at work uncovering, discovering, and recovering a black theology which may mean a black religion that is true to itself as the way into the Christian faith for a people so long denied a piece of this rational turf. What black theology will be does not yet fully appear. Here we must be content with bow and why this creative dimension emerges at this juncture. For religion has been the boon but theology the bane of black existence.

I

We can arrive at an understanding of this phenomenon if we start at the beginning. The seed for English planting of the New World was lodged in the mind of Richard Hakluyt as a result of his Paris experience. A brilliant Anglican clergyman, astute geographer and mathematician, Hakluyt was also a staunch patriot. The Paris experience sharpened his awareness of New World explorations by Roman Catholic dominated countries. Because of his anti-Roman Catholic zeal, his patriotism, his disciplined mind, and his friendship with Sir Walter Raleigh, Hakluyt was encouraged to write Queen Elizabeth a detailed argument for the extension of England into the New World.

This document, Western Planting, was written in 1584. In it Hakluyt developed three fundamental reasons for Englishmen to journey across the seas and settle permanently on these shores. If his design was not followed to the letter, there is no doubt that its spirit became flesh.

First, he underscored the political power which would accrue to the nation through the outreach of her people. Second, he emphasized the enrichment of the nation by means of new economic resources singularly available in the New World. Third, be cited the opportunity of providing the heathen natives with the true religion as opposed to their unenlightened traditions and the unacceptable Roman Catholic version of Christianity.

In the next quarter of a century or so, these things clearly did not work together for good. The colonialists in Virginia were politically dependent, economic development predominated, and the Anglican clergymen were limited in resourcefulness so that missionary activity among the Indians took such forms as an enterprising marriage between the princess Pocahontas and John Rolfe as well as development of an Indian college. These and other individual enterprises failed as Christian missionary techniques due to the death of Mrs. Rebecca Rolfe, her father King Powhatan, and the Indian resistance culminating in attacks upon the white intruders.

Puritans to the north came to the New World not so much to extend the institutions of their severed homeland as to create

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new ones expressing their peculiar persuasions. Politics, economics, and religion quickly became virtually one. The energy spent in this embroiled arrangement was so consuming that very little remained for responsible thinking and action vis-a-vis the Christian message to the Indians. That was largely left to the John Eliots and Roger Williamses.

The political ties to England and the refusal of Indians to give up their traditions for Christian ones were enough to insure the inevitable dominance of economic development in the New World. The white indentured servants proved unequal to the task and the Indians uninterested in it. It is most difficult to determine what might have occurred here had not the English discovered the Africans.

II

Traditional black Africans were enslaved by Moslems from the seventh century A.D. (a tradition which has not completely ended). Slave trading, however, was never the keystone to Moslem economies. Moreover, Moslems engaged in general trading with black Africans with whom they related intimately and genuinely respected. The fact that many black Africans continue to become Moslems is a result not of Moslem missionary imperialism but their acceptance of Africans and their traditions. The penetration into Southern Europe by the Moslems opened the door into Africa and the slave trade for Roman Catholic Portugal, Spain, and France.

Unlike the Roman Catholics who plundered Africa for political, economic, and religious enterprises, the English first enslaved for economic reasons alone. Missionaries did not accompany the slave trading ships of the English, as they did those from Roman Catholic countries of Europe. It was well into the seventeenth century, when the seemingly insatiable need and unlimited supply of slaves required a defense, that the English began to speak in terms of Christianizing the heathen Africans.

If the English were fierce competitors with the continent and ruthless capitalist exploiters, they were also strident Protestants, with a near hatred of Roman Catholic traditions. They were people of the book, who were not only literate but inflexibly and unimaginably so. If an idea or pattern was not written down (or able to be so), it was brushed aside as base or valueless.

The more African slaves the English took, the more they became involved in African traditions, and the more they defended their exploitation as a Christian or humane gift. The Africans were oral traditionalists (a form not unknown to English biblicists) and a preliterate people (a condition despised by the people of the word).

It was not that the Africans were ignorant of God, but that the English were dead-set in the conviction that God could only be

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understood in their way. They were impatient, brushing aside African traditions with the same careless appreciation they showed for African lives. It was not that the Africans failed to be a religious people (they were more religious in their respect for nature than the English); it was that in their religion Africans were community centered while Englishmen were concerned about the individual soul's salvation alone. It was not that the Africans did not believe in the in dwelling presence of the spirit, but that they believed the spirit or power of God dwelled in rocks and trees and stars and ancestors. It was not that Africans worshipped these captors of the continuing spirit, but that they sought to gain from them -their accrued power for the well-being of the community. Africans also believed that man in and of himself is helpless or powerless, that without gaining the power God released in the universe under the control of lesser gods and forces, man is nothing.

Traditional Africans continue to be vitalists who believe that the task of man is to live life now and fully through gaining of all the power he can, while traditional Englishmen have not strayed far from the concern with salvation for the next world. As it turned out, the Protestant focus on the world to come resulted in abundant wealth in this world. We are getting ahead of ourselves, but it may be that the African focus on this world may result in abundant wealth in the world to come.

Of course, the limits of these pages prevent us from doing more than pointing to substantive issues to be developed elsewhere. Here it is sufficient to disclose that blind English greed without social values and religious zeal without knowledge or compassion meant that Africans were torn from their spiritual roots. Moreover, the drum, their essential instrument for community worship and action, was stripped from them.

III

For nearly a century after the arrival of the first Africans, this people-for whom everything was religious-lay languishing. They were not only cut off from their past traditions but given no new ones. Exceptional individuals were made Christians because of the concern of a tender white soul, but they did not prove the rule. Even here it became unmistakably clear that the African must give up all of his past (at least to the extent whites could measure its presence), for it was savage, heathen, and barbaric.

It is important to recall here that Africans took on the tradition of the Englishman wherever it was offered not solely because he had no alternative or lacked resistance. Africans traditionally seek power without regard to advocates. If an ethnic rival claims a power, that does not constitute a barrier. Thus when Christians

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came with their goods and maxim gun and enslavement in the name of their God, it was natural for Africans to be open to the Christians' God in the hopes that that power might come to them and subside in the enemy.

Whatever the African expectations, or those of the formal Puritans and Anglicans, they were cast anew with the bursting forth of the evangelicals. In this new climate of religion with feeling, the equality of black and white souls before God, and the message of the gospel of freedom, Africans saw little reason for hanging on to the past and every reason for hope in the new tradition.

The old traditions formally died, but concern for community, power, and a full life here and now remained and were given new expressions. By the end of the eighteenth century it was clear that whites had won the battle of dominance, but not to the exclusion of all ties with the past. Blacks, free or slave, bad nowhere to worship except with whites and under their auspices (even on the plantations where the house meetings were permitted for a while). But whites also lost. They excluded blacks from positions of leadership and forced them to create their parallel institutions.

The parallel black Christian churches (later denominations) were centers of brotherhood, charity, and ethical action, as well as spiritual homes. They not only engaged in the establishment of institutional religion among blacks but participated in missionary activity among the slaves, carrying the word of independence and freedom.

Independent black denominations (Methodists and Baptists) had no quarrel with their white sponsors with regard to theology, doctrines, and ecclesiology. They copied them directly without apology, for they were claiming equal validity. There was no attempt to return to African traditions, for they had accepted the Christian one. The clearest indication of this acceptance of white institutions is the black churches sending missionaries to Africa. Their quarrel with the white churches was over the questions of freedom and equality and justice for which they stood four-square, to the point of proselytizing the great mass of blacks under white leadership after the Civil War.

IV

In the rush to build black religious institutions in the mistaken belief that freedom had come, and oppressed by the black codes and increasing segregation following the war, independent black denominations soon became intellectually stagnant. Theology, doctrines, and ecclesiology became traditions rather than dynamic movements. Religion as release from white oppression first replaced and then usurped religion as community-centered, power-

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oriented, and freedom-risking. This authentic dimension did not die, and instead of becoming traditional in each church, it was kept alive through real but undependable charismatic leadership. It finally burst forth in a glorious flame through the incendiary deeds of Martin Luther King, Jr. That man among men threw light on the institutional failure (for he largely worked outside of it). With his passing and that of the Civil Rights movement, blacks were left to deny their Christian heritage (a la Malcolm X), return to their slovenly, slumbering ways, or think and act anew. For the oppression continues!

It has been increasingly clear to the young and aggressive black Christians that the American experience has cut them off intellectually from their roots. To be sure, there is only one American experience in which blacks and whites and reds and browns are caught up. It is true that whites have dominated the blacks, browns, and reds through rape, exploitation, and superior forces of extermination. But though each has an unequal share of the bloody American pie, each is of equal worth. The past cannot be undone. The future can be made only out of the values of the present. New values may well be required if the future is to be different from the past. The values of whites have dominated without interruption. Leaving aside the others, the values of blacks have been repressed, suppressed, and ignored.

There is no way for most blacks not to be Christians. Whites have done too good a job here. But to be Christian by confession is not enough for a people in this society. Christianity is a rational faith. It feeds on theology. Those who have determined the response to that faith have been those who have contributed theologies born of their crises (critical experiences). These theologies run all the way from Quakers, Methodists, Calvinists, Lutherans, and evangelicals to the theology of hope, existentialism, process, etc. There is a deep sense in which you are not an American unless you own a piece of the turf. In some similar sense, one is not a determiner of Christianity unless one brings an intellectual or theological contribution.

In the midst of abiding inequality and poverty based on race, young black Christians are coming to an awareness of their task in formulating a black theology. There is a realism here which is not based on the false claims of nationalists. There is an attempt to attend the low burning fires of Christian universality, for the aim of black theology, like all Christian theology, is to bring more light and truth and action from the word.

In this endeavor, blacks are not alone. There is an unexpected windfall from the earlier missions of black American Christians to their African brothers. From those roots of a message not only

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of salvation but of freedom, justice, and equality has blossomed the fruit of independence among Africans, not only in their violent resistance in Southern Rhodesia and search for national independence, but also in the fight not to be buried by Western missionaries who are just beginning to appreciate African values.

V

It is the emergence of black African Christian life that is today a major factor in the development of black American theology. First, the black man can see that the African is not adverse to Christianity. Second, be sees that the African has not been isolated or severed from the ethnic traditions. Third, the American black sees that the African is seeking to work out a theology which is rooted in his heritage. While a great deal of work has yet to be done by way of translating African beliefs and literature into literate documents, the African Christian is at work demanding that white and black Christians come to terms with Christianity in the light of the African experience. How this will work out lies in the future.

Here in America it is clear that the development of black theology will depend, in part, upon discovering, recovering, and uncovering that African past from which they have been grievously uprooted. In part, it will depend upon black scholars being at work setting forth the traditions of their slave ancestors in the backwoods of Virginia, North and South Carolina, the Georgia Sea Islands, etc. In part, it means the study of those traditions as they developed in Haiti, Brazil, Jamaica, etc.

One thing is clear. The paucity of black scholars in the various fields of religion (as well as other disciplines) demonstrably affects the creative work of the theologian. There are signs that this vacuum is being entered.

Necessity is the mother of black theology. It is increasingly clear that black folk are going to remain separate from whites in their churches as they are in their neighborhoods. Both of these realities demand a reappraisal of the truth that black religion exists of, by, and for the black community. It is true to itself and its God only to the extent it serves this community by meeting its needs.

It is the task of theology to call religion to its responsibility in each generation. Given the need and the opportunity we are just beginning to see the emergence of a luminous black theology. Unlike white (European) theology, its roots are the African, Afro-American experiences. Thus, it begins with the sacredness of an natural and human events. There is no sacred-secular dichotomy in thought, speech, spirit, will, or deed. Reflection and passion are joined with action and compassion. But doing black theology is also new.

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VI

Black theology contrasts with white theology in that it is first and foremost community rather than individualistically oriented. It is the will of the community and its best interest which becomes the will and interest of the individual and not vice versa. It is all for one and one for all. The experience of racism leads to the awareness that what is true in this world has truth if there is a world to come: to be black is a condition unmitigated by personal achievement. Instead of counting for nought, blackness counts for something.

Black theology differs from white theology in that it is concerned to live life fully here and now without fear of reward or punishment in the next world. White theology has not only attempted to pick off one soul at the expense of another, but it has also pretended that what a man loses in this world he will gain in the next. In effect, this means that whites are able to gain everything in this world and heaven too. The experience of blacks has led them to think theologically about the meaning of gaining all they can in this world and allowing the next world to take care of itself. But this gaining of all in this world is not personal well-being at the expense of others. It is interpersonal well-being, a sharing with the less fortunate of one's own gains and luck so that the other is not just raised sufficiently above poverty not to make waves-but raised to the level where he can contribute equally of his talents in a society where charity is obsolete.

Black theology veers away from white theology in that one seeks in and through community not salvation for the next world but power for this world. Black theology is power-seeking for community, rather than materialistic and spiritualistic gain for self-centeredness. At the heart of black theology, the awareness is emerging that the highest and lowest man can know is man, for both dwell within him. The task of man is to seek power to overbalance the lowest with the highest which is what it means to be grateful for life. To be a man is to seek the power God has bestowed in the universe, to conserve it for the well-being of all through knowledge and compassion. Black theology affirms that to be a man is quite an undertaking, the only way one can respond in kind to gracious acts of God as revealed in Christ.

Black theology breaks from white theology in the affirmation that what is good for black people is good for all people, that to work for the best interest of black people is to work for the best interest of all people. The experience of being at the bottom in this society and being rejected throughout the world because of sharing an African heritage brings something new to the faith. Its test is the oneness not only in soul but in body and material well-being.

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Nothing less is demanded in the light of the kingdom of God. To seek anything else is to counter the theology born of black experience. To fail in this seeking is quite different than substituting something for fear of failure.

Mainstream black theology is distinguished from mainstream white theology in its emphasis upon the centrality of feeling, emotional religion. The power that is generated in black worship is not to be abandoned but directed into community action. As in the African tradition, where the community gathers to gain power to act in a concerted manner on a community concern, power in black worship is not to be used for relief from suffering or lost in bureaucratic red tape. It is an enabling and directed action upon a issue threatening the health of a black community.

The whole of black experience affirmed, critically evaluated, and deployed may not result in merely a different style of singing (hymns, blues, spirituals, gospels), preaching, praying, or emoting. It may be all of these fashioned into a powerful harness, pulling community after community into a virtual fire of freedom, justice, and equality that will set this people and their society aglow with oneness in the here and now.

This is not a prediction. I fully expect black theology to take on some of these aspects and hope it goes beyond them in a deeper response to the reality that holds us all in the sphere of existence.