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"Black people have read the Bible in a way which informed them that God's freedom challenged all forms of bondage in the world... If black power can be defined as the search for black humanity and freedom, then black power would be rooted in divine power. As divine power is related to black power, an encounter between the divine content and the contemporary context takes place."

Black Theology: Retrospect and Prospect
By Noel Leo Erskine

As we approach the end of the 1970s in which black theology flowered as a fully fledged theology, it is appropriate to look back on its major emphases and also to look forward to what may be its focus and direction in the 1980s.

Although black theology in its present form became widely recognized through the writings of scholars such as James Cone, Major Jones, and Deotis Roberts, it must not be thought that black theology began in the late '60s or early '70s; rather, its roots are found in the attempt of generations of black people to understand themselves and their environment from a Christian perspective. In the period of slavery, these roots arc found in folklore, sermons, songs, and speeches. The raw material would not be formal theological reflection but, similar to the Hebrew Scriptures, it was God's history with people in struggle. To affirm this connection between Israel and black people is to begin to understand that the black church was both cradle and context of black people's attempt to understand their world and themselves.

I

Whether one examines the contributions of George Liele or Andrew Bryan at the Yamacraw Baptist Church in 1777, or that of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen at Bethel Methodist Church in 1787, it becomes very evident that the attempt by black people to relate God to the black experience in a way which called into question the forces

Noel Leo Erskine is Assistant Professor of The Theology and Ethics. Candler School of Theology, Emory University in Atlanta. He is a graduate of Calabar College, West Indies, the University of London, Duke University, and Union Theological Seminary, New York. He is the author of Black People and the Reformed Church in America (1978).

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of oppression and signaled release for victims was always a characteristic of black life in the New World.

This is illustrated in the understanding that Martin Delaney had about God's relationship to the cruel world of oppression which victimized black people. Writing in 1852, Delaney stated that he found it contradictory that the God of the Bible would prosper white people and curse black people. He pointed out that although there were no easy answers to the questions raised concerning black power and destiny he felt that black people should do more than pray, they should apply themselves in ways that would result in the changing of the world. Delaney spells this out:

We are no longer slaves, believing any interpretation that our oppressors may give the word of God, for the purpose of deluding us to the more easy subjugation, but freemen, comprising some of the first minds of intelligence and rudimental qualifications, in the country. What then is the remedy, for our degradation and oppression? This appears now to be the only remaining question-the means of successful elevation in this our native land? This depends entirely upon the application of the means of elevation ¹

Delaney was convinced that hope for black people resided in their helping themselves and refusing to allow white people to interpret the Scriptures and the world for them. According to Delaney, when black people read the Scriptures in the light of their situation, they discover that their quest for human dignity and freedom is consistent with the biblical theme of freedom. Implicit in Delaney's attempt to relate an exegesis of Scripture and society is an outline for black theology.

Other black theologians of the nineteenth century such as Bishop Henry McNeil Turner and Marcus Garvey further serve to remind us that the roots of black theology go back to the black church. They serve to remind us that it is inaccurate to believe that the concept of the blackness of God which surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s was then being discussed for the first time in the black church. Indeed, Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, who was elected bishop of the African Methodist Church in 1880, took Martin Delaney seriously as he read the Bible and indicated that on the basis of his reading of Scripture he could affirm that God was black. He puts it this way:

We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negroe, as you buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man. For the bulk of you and all the fool Negroes of the country believe that God is white-skinned, blue eyed, straight-haired, projected nosed, compressed lipped and finely robed white gentleman, sitting upon a throne somewhere in the heavens. Every race of people since time began who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or 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 Negroe believe that he resembles God

¹ Cited by Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, Doubleday, 1972, p 153.

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as much as other people? … We certainly protest against God being white at all. ²

When contemporary black theology is read in this light it comes to the fore that the symbol of blackness used by contemporary black theologians to relate God to the plight of oppression in North America was not manufactured by them or taken from outside the black church, but that the symbol was one of the givens of the black community. Something of a rough outline for black theology was already present in the black community. As black people searched the Scriptures for themselves, a conversation between the biblical content and the contemporary context ensued. In this contact between the biblical text and the experience of oppression, they began to draw conclusions that God meant them for freedom and that God was identified with them in their struggle for meaning and freedom. This led Marcus Garvey, a prophet of black liberation, to claim that black people like the children of Israel were captives in the white man's land and it was God's will that black people be set free. "As children of captivity we took forward to a new, yet ever old land of our fathers, the land of God's crowning glory. We shall gather together our children, our treasures and our loved ones, and as the children of Israel, by the command of God, face the promised land." ³ Garvey devoted his life to the explication of black pride and black dignity as the foundation of black community.

There was certainly no need for Bishop Turner or for Marcus Garvey to exegete Scripture or the world which oppressed them in the light of a white ideal. For them the blackness of God ensured the sanctity and humanity of the black community. Hence Garvey could say: "We Negroes believe in the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God-God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, the one God of all ages. This is the God in whom we believe, but we shall worship him through the spectacles of Ethiopia." ⁴

Black people have read the Bible in a way which informed them that God's freedom challenged all forms of bondage in the world. Black people's reading of Scripture made it very clear that the God who made the world wills the freedom of all people. Although they lived in a world in which human bondage threatened the power of freedom, the gospel for them was that God's freedom breaks the power of bondage and offers to the victims of oppression the possibility to be free.

II

The role of the black church in the development of black theology reached a high point in two significant movements which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in North America. I refer to the civil rights movement led by the Baptist preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the black

² Ibid., p. 173.
³ Cited by Leonard Barrett, Soul Force, Anchor, 1974, p. 129.
⁴ Amy Jacques Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Atheneum, 1969, p. 44.

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power movement led by Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, the son of a Baptist preacher. The black power movement is related to the black church not only because the term was coined by the Baptist preacher from Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell, at a rally in Chicago in May, 1965, but also because its philosophy of black dignity and determination had its roots in the teaching of black church leaders such as Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Bishop Henry Turner. and Marcus Garvey.

Although these two movements went in two different directions, the civil rights movement aimed at a reformation of American life and the black power movement demanded a changing of the structures of oppression, each in significant ways had immense influence on the development and articulation of black theology.

In the midst of the black power struggle which came to a head with the issuing of the Black Manifesto by James Forman to the white religious establishment, a little known theologian published his first book, Black Theology and Black Power, in which he contended that black power was the power of Jesus Christ. "The existence of the Church is grounded exclusively in Christ And in twentieth century America, Christ means Black Power!" ⁵ In a chapter on the "Black Church and Black Power," Cone points out that his understanding of black power was not strange to the black church but rather emerged out of the life and teaching of the latter. While grounding his work in the black power movement and at the same time calling into question the love ethic of the civil rights movement, Cone asserts, "Some Black preachers, like the Rev Highland Garnet, even urged outright rebellion against the evils of white power. He knew that appeals to 'love' or 'good will' would have little effect on minds warped by their own high estimation of themselves and therefore he taught that the spirit of liberty is a gift from God, and God thus endows the slave with the zeal to break the chains of slavery. "⁶ He further points out that the black power movement emerged out of the civil rights movement because black people had become disenchanted with Martin Luther King, Jr's emphasis on Jesus' demand to love the enemy. ⁷

On the other hand, Major Jones and Deotis Roberts, while using the symbols of blackness and liberation, grounded their theologies more in the reformist wing of the civil rights movement. Hence non-violence, integration, and reconciliation are viable goals of their theologies. Jones could say that it was not crucial being a black person, what was important was being a person. "To say that I am a man among men, it would seem, means infinitely more than merely to say that I am a black man or a white man. To be black or to be white is merely incidental, but to assert that 'I am a man' is essential." ⁸ In contrast, Cone regards the denial of blackness as the loss of identity and the basis of sin in the black

⁵ James Cone, Black Theology, and Black Power, Seabury 1969, p 112.
⁶ Ibid, p 96
⁷ Ibid, p 47
⁸ Major Jones, Black Awareness, Abingdon, 1971, p 68.

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community. "If we are to understand sin and what it means to black people, it is necessary to be black and also a participant in the black liberation struggle....Sin then for black people is the loss of identity. "⁹ The difference in perspective presented in these two approaches to black theology is not only due to Cone's attempt to develop an experiential model for black theology in contrast to the Jones/Roberts attempt to ferret out a theological/ethical model which tries to give ethical and theological substance to what love requires in a situation of racism, it is also due to the different emphases in the civil rights/black power movement to which all these theologians relate. Deotis Roberts dissociates himself from the more militant stance represented by James Cone when he states: "Many blacks who are not Christians are associated with 'the religion of black power.' A black theologian who operates from the Christian faith has difficulty being heard in this company..... A Christian theologian is not an interpreter of the religion of black power. "¹⁰

Although we referred to the Jones/Roberts explication as the theological/ethical model and to Cone's as the experiential, or more fitting, "A Theology of the Black Experience," it is rather clear that Cone's work has theological/ethical emphases and the Jones/Roberts model draws on the black experience, more fundamentally, however, the central thrust which unites these two approaches is their emphasis on justification by faith. There is a similarity between Martin Luther's breakthrough in the sixteenth century and that of black Americans in the second half of the twentieth century, but there is also a difference while Luther's search for a gracious God led him in the discovery of his identity, black people's search for their identity led them to the discovery of a gracious God.

III

If Paul Althaus is correct in contending that the central questions which occupied Luther's thought were: (a) What does God intend to do with us sinful humanity? (b) What is God's relationship toward me? and (c) How does God feel about me?, then it becomes readily apparent that similar concerns fired the imaginations of black theologians as they related God to the search for dignity and peoplehood in the black community" ¹¹ Faith became for black people the way out of Egypt, and the Exodus became for them the paradigm of what God was about in the world. The God of the Exodus is on the side of the black community leading them out of enslavement under white power toward the promised land of a new humanity. The living God does not only lead people out of slavery but comes to destroy the power of the enslaving society. "Christ is the Liberator and the Christian faith promises 'deliverance to

⁹ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Lippincott, 1970, p. 196.
¹⁰ Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation Westminster, 197 1, p 2.
¹¹ Paul Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther Fortress, 1966, p 181.

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the captives.' It promises to let the oppressed go free." ¹² Black theologians take great care to point out that in the light of the Exodus motif and the New Testament understanding of Christ as liberator, it is very clear how God feels and what God intends to do with the oppressors and the oppressed. "He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts....., has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted them of low degree. God is at work, to pluck up and break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. For behold a king is born in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord... a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manager. And behold, this child is set for the failing and rising of many in Israel.

The cardinal point in the doctrine of justification is the victory of God's love over everything that contradicts and opposes it . Black theology affirms that in Jesus Christ God entered human history and engaged the forces of oppression in combat and has decisively defeated them. The power of whiteness has been broken as blackness has become the symbol of authentic humanity. In a world in which white skin meant social privilege and advantage and black skin meant inferiority, the good news is that the freedom of God has broken the power of human bondage and black people can accept their blackness. James Cone echoes Martin Luther when he states: "The Bible, it is important to note, does not consist of units of infallible truth about God or Jesus. Rather, it tells the story, of God's will to redeem humankind from sin, death, and Satan. According to the New Testament witnesses, God's decisive act against these powers happened in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. "¹³ "Though the decisive battle against evil has been fought and won, the war, however, is not over. " ¹⁴

It is because the battle against white domination and enslavement has been won that the themes of protest and identity-formation have become the main key in which black theologians have interpreted the doctrine of justification by faith. Black people protest against a world in which injustice reigns because the good news is that in Jesus Christ the liberator, God has defeated the powers of death and the devil. God in saying yes to the oppressed has said no to all that would deny them the right to be human. Because the battle against injustice, economic exploitation, and racism has been won, the present situation in which death reigns must be regarded as temporary. As hope is grounded in God's decisive work in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, black people must believe that change is already taking place in the present situation. And this is what faith must mean in the context of oppression that the present order of injustice is passing. Because of God's gracious action toward us in Jesus Christ, faith means freedom from the false estimate of the self as inferior to other selves. What God

¹² Deotis Roberis op cit p 32.
¹³ God of the Oppressed, Seabury, 1975 p 110.
¹⁴" Black Theology and Black Power p 40.

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has effected historically in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is accomplished daily through the justification of people who have claimed their freedom as sons and daughters of God and say NO to all that would encroach on their freedom. Therefore liberation becomes the content of justification.

In a world in which the white church often calls people to its ways rather than God's ways, black theology becomes the people's voice of protest against white supremacy and the attempt of white people to play God in the area of race relations. In this regard liberation "is shouting yes to black humanity and no to white oppression. " It is shouting that exploitation and victimization that resulted from racism do not have their foundation in God's will but in the attempt of oppressors to pretend they are God. Hence black theologians, whether they sought to develop a theology of the black experience or a theological/ethical statement which was aimed at exposing the contradictions between the American way of life and the gospel of liberation, could voice their protest against the sin of idolatry implicit in the practice of racism. Therefore racism was exposed not only for its sin against self, but against God. Black theology's exposure of the sin of racism pointed it up for what it is: the very basis of sin in that it constitutes the attempt of people to deceive themselves by pretending they are God. In protest against this idolatrous use of skin color, black theologians reversed categories and referred to whiteness as evil and blackness as the point of departure for talk about authentic humanity.

One of the values of this form of protest is that it forces white people to re-think the meaning of whiteness. In the cruet world of oppression, whiteness has always symbolized exploitation and dehumanization for black people. Its aim has often been the domestication of black people. But because the battle has been won against the tyrants of racism, injustice, and evil, "Black people know that white people do not have the last word on black existence." It was this realization that forced black theologians not only to focus on protest as a consequence of their being justified by faith, but to begin with some intentionally to formulate an understanding of identity-formation in the black community.

IV

Just as protest is a form of affirmation, since it has its basis on God's action toward us in justification, so affirmation is also the hidden side of protest .It is only in recent years, however, that black theologians have allowed the needs of the black community to determine the theological agenda. It is not until James Cone's third book, The Spirituals and the Blues ( 1972), that we see a sustained attempt from a leading black theologian to allow the agenda of the black community to determine the shape and content of black theology. Prior to this, Cone used Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Jean Paul Sartre to help him protest against the atrocities of white racism. This shift of emphasis gave black theology an opportunity to deal with the empowerment of the black community.

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While black theology should not lose sight of the divine "no" addressed to the perpetrators of oppression, it should begin to give equal time to the divine "yes" addressed to the victims of oppression. Indeed this is to suggest that justification must look toward sanctification. It is the response in obedience to the divine word that is crucial here. This would force the black community to deal with the dynamics of its community and to ask awkward questions about classism and sexism and the black communities' relationship to oppression in third world nations. To ask about the divine presence in the community of the oppressed would lead us to inquire whether we as a people who benefit from the American way of life participate in the exploitation of third world nations by multi-national corporations.

In an attempt to get further handles to help in the empowerment of the black community, we ask if justification by faith is enough. Does faith need something more? In his God of the Oppressed, James Cone has intimated that a significant role of black theology has to do with the analysis of the structures of oppression; hence, the more which faith needs is a social theory which will give clues to procedures and methods for dealing with the demonic structures of oppression. It seems clear that for James Cone the more that justification by faith needs is Marxism. This insight is significant if black theology is to take Latin American theology seriously. And yet the warning of a Baptist preacher is also to be taken seriously Dr. J. H. Jackson, President of the National Baptist Convention, which has a membership of over six million people, has pointed out that for black theology to see Marxist theory as an interpretative tool is for black theology to become a theology of polarization. Dr. Jackson suggests that James Cone's use of the symbol "blackness" also leads to polarization not only between black people and white people, but between black people. Although James Cone's explication of the symbol blackness is often misleading, if Dr. Jackson grasped the double meaning it has for Cone, both its ontological and physical meanings, he would begin to understand that the term does not only refer to a people whose skin color is black but to all who are in solidarity with the oppressed. However, the point of Jackson's criticism remains, that whatever symbols or categories black theology uses should not result in its alienation from the black church but should be a way of giving theology back to the church.

In referring to Cone's articulation of black theology, Jackson states. "When he arrives at the color of Jesus, Professor Cone does it by the hands of dialectical materialism. But when he speaks of his rich religious experiences that he has encountered in the teaching of his parents and in the great tradition of the historic AME Church, he is then standing on another level of Christian experience and Christian insights."¹⁵ Indeed it seems that what Jackson is suggesting is that black theology should use symbols that are derived from the black church.

¹⁵ J H Jackson, Nairobi A Joke a Junket or a Journey Townsend Press, p 75

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There is no need for black theologians to go to Europe and borrow from Karl Marx. Jackson suggests that the clue may be in the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit. "There is available to all mankind the power and the presence of the Spirit of God that has and will sustain the prisoners who are incarcerated for truth while it brings a spirit of uneasiness as well as a sense of guilt and shame upon the persons who hold the keys which fasten the chains, bind the limbs of the prisoners, and lock the doors which hold the innocent sufferers." ¹⁶

V

Directions for the future of black theology should come from the black church. Justification must ask for sanctification. Black theology must begin to take root in the contemporary black church as it inquires about the divine activity in the world. Its task in conjunction with its articulation of human freedom, which is God's gift to the church through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is to begin to ask about the formulation of the divine presence in the world.

Perhaps a part of what this means for the future of black theology is that as sanctification is affirmed as liberation, the theological/ethical method of Jones and Roberts and the experiential method of Cone will be included in a dialogical method in which divine power will become the point of departure for talk about what God is doing in church and world. This would not mean that the concerns of the black community would be minimized, but if black power can be defined as the search for black humanity and freedom, then black power would be rooted in divine power. As divine power is related to black power, an encounter between the divine content and the contemporary context takes place.

Because liberation is the aim of sanctification, black theology must call attention to the personal and social dimensions of sin as well as the personal and social dimensions of sanctification. Very often when the black church talks about the sanctified life, it is referring specifically to sanctification from sins, such as fornication, smoking, etc. What this emphasis does is to focus on the personal. The importance of this emphasis is that it points out that the sin that enslaves people is not merely social but inward and personal. It further forces us to deal with the enslavement of the will and the breaking of the inner bondage which binds us. Its weakness is that it neglects the social dimension. What is needed here is a social understanding of sanctification.

A new social understanding of the sanctified life would indicate that action in the name of justice and participation in the changing of unjust structures are part of what it means to be Christian. As divine power is related to black power, the changing of the individual and the changing of the world are not seen as two separate events but as two aspects of the same event. As divine power is disclosed to us, God's will for our lives is made known and we begin to understand that something is wrong with

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 77.

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our world. We discover in the manifestation of divine power in our community that something is wrong with the way our world is structured. In the light of the divine activity in our midst, we discern that the social and economic order fail to meet human need. It begins to become clear that we have produced systems of production that enrich a few and make others poor. As we begin to discern the divine power at work in the world, we note that the human family is divided into oppressors and oppressed. We begin to learn that social sin is entrenched in the very fabric of the social and economic order.

As the victims of oppression respond and participate in the divine presence, they are transformed as they begin to turn the world upside down (Acts 17:6). In the Exodus of the Children of Israel and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, oppressed people understand clearly that the divine presence is associated with justice for the poor and that the divine power is at work in the world overthrowing unjust structures. Hence as the divine content is related to the contemporary context, black power becomes more than a calling of unjust structures into question. As black power is grounded in divine power, the oppressed become participants in the creation of a new order. The vision which impels them is that of the sanctified community. A community in which people are respected not because of their achievements and accomplishments but because of their presence. In this community the elderly will not be edged out into nursing homes but will be celebrated for their humanity Isaiah clarifies the vision for us.

No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the child shall die a hundred years old and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them, they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit, they shall not plant and another eat, for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall enjoy the work of my hands (Isaiah 65:20-22).