Black Theology

As we find ourselves in a new moment of wearisome and violent racial recrimination, as the ghoul of whiteness and white supremacy returns again more intensely than ever, manifesting in the New Jim Crow, the scandalous murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, and most recently, the mass violent march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, the voices of Merton and Baldwin in concert on race are more important than ever for us to encounter, imbibe, and embody. This essay will return anew to the  dialogue between Merton and Baldwin on race, humanity, spiritual integrity and dignity, and the course of American and planetary history. While the dialogue between Merton and Baldwin was not one of personal, direct friendship, nevertheless their minds, hearts, and souls were very much in the same place. This essay will frame their dialogue, a dialogue that must extend to our own everyday consciousness, through a comparative and constructive examination of Baldwin’s 1963 book-length essay The Fire Next Time with Merton’s 1964 essay “Letters to a White Liberal” which opens his anthology Seeds of Destruction. Using an adaptation of the medical model for addressing deeply embedded and embodied illnesses of the social body, I will explore the common language Merton and Baldwin use to diagnose the infection of whiteness in the American commons, in American history, culture, and theology. I will then engage in a similar examination of their mutual call for a therapeutic regimen of healing from whiteness through radical, uncompromising love rooted in the prophetic moment of kairos and the conversion pathways of metanoia. This regimen of healing transcends retributive remodeling of racial hierarchy, the subsequent reinscribing and deepening of racial alienation, and the shallow waters of paradigms of reconciliation and integration towards radical repair and re-discovery of our common existence.

This research paper will demonstrate the context of the ani\anawim as integral in understanding, communicating, and exploring kenosis concerning both Jesus and His followers. Discussions of kenosis seemingly diminish anawimic components to secondary results or subordinate of kenotic action and participation. This tendency tilts the conversation and understandings away from covenantal history and the First Testament's  prophetic tradition, thus diminishing and distorting the significant import of the ani\anawim in all areas of theology and life.

This paper will argue that kenosis is better understood through an anawimic context and possibly only achievable within that position. This paper will posit that kenosis is better understood within the posture and position within the salvific narrative, which is intrinsically anawimic. The ani\anawim is the “How” of kenosis.  This will be demonstrated by defining terminology vital to understanding this thesis supported by scriptural witness and supplemented with historical examples that illustrate this idea. Research and literature from various sources and Christian traditions over the last two thousand years will be utilized to establish the argument of the necessity of kenosis embedded and interpenetrating within an anawimic context. This interpenetration of ani/ anawim and kenosis may prove beneficial to better understanding, listening, communicating, and participating in a devoted response to Jesus.
Additionally, the importance of trauma will be tangled within this document for potential further discussion and assisting on this journey as there is a significant connection with ani/anawim.

Een vijftiental zwarte theologiestudenten trad in de jaren 1970 en 1980 op als grensoverschrijdende bemiddelaars tussen de Zuid-Afrikaanse beweging voor zwarte theologie en zwart bewustzijn en de Nederlandse protestantse kerken. Zij arriveerden in een tijd dat de hechte band tussen de Nederlandse en witte Zuid-Afrikaanse protestantse kerken afbrokkelde en de wereldwijde burgerrechtenbeweging en dekolonisatieprocessen een nieuwe blik op zwart leiderschap teweeg brachten.
De Zuid-Afrikaanse studenten brachten hun persoonlijke ervaringen met de ongelijkheid onder apartheid in zowel kerk als theologie in, en lieten zo een nieuwe stem horen in de debatten onder Nederlandse protestanten. Doordat zij deze voor Nederland vreemde ervaringen verbonden met de vertrouwde gereformeerde traditie, droegen zij bij aan een kritische houding in de Nederlandse protestantse kerken ten aanzien van de witte gereformeerde Zuid-Afrikaanse kerken, die loyaal waren aan het apartheidsregime.
Door de bijdrage van Mpho Ntoane, één van de studenten, aan deze transnationale overdracht te volgen, krijgt de lezer meer zicht op de betekenis van deze studenten voor het groeiende inzicht in de protestantse kerken in Nederland dat de ervaring van zwarte Zuid-Afrikanen hun beleid ten aanzien van de kerken in Zuid-Afrika moest bepalen.

Many Americans in the nineteenth century argued for limited education for blacks –or no education at all for African Americans in the south. As a result, black churches took up the role and pushed for education as a means to liberate African Americans.1 The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church stands as a good exemplar for a black denomination that explicitly expressed in their policies that they understood the connection of education to African American liberation. This study is a historical analysis of the AME Church’s advocacy of African American empowerment through education from 1816 to 1893.

In the AME Church’s nineteenth century doctrinal statements and publications the leaders explicitly stated that education was a necessary component for black liberation. In this dissertation I argue that, although there were other organizations that pushed for African American education in the nineteenth century, the African Methodist Episcopal Church stood at the fore in advocating for education and connecting it to African American liberation. My primary question is: How did the AME Church connect their advocacy for black education to liberation for African Americans in the nineteenth century?
The dissertation will explore two aspects of liberation in the nineteenth century. During the first half of the nineteenth century–from the AME Church’s founding in 1816 through the end of the Civil war in 18652–the Church worked toward a liberation that
1 Elliot, G.M. “We Must Educate”. AME Church Review. (April 1885): 330-34.
2 Chapter Three begins in 1816 with the founding of the AME Church and ends in 1865 the end of the Civil War. 1865 is also significant because slavery was officially abolished in December of the same year with the passing of the 13th Amendment focused on the abolition of slavery and overcoming racial oppression. In the latter half of the nineteenth century from 1865 to 1893 –with the death of Bishop Payne– the AME Church focused on a liberation that was geared toward the notions of uplift and self-agency within the black community, namely black social, economic, and political advancement.
The last chapter will examine how this historical analysis has implications for transforming African American education in present times. The text will examine the black church and its ability to empower the African American community through education, focusing on research that has been done on the role of the contemporary black church in African American education.

A referida temática se enquadra na esfera da Teologia Pública. Assim, pretende-se com este tema dar um contributo em como pensar a fé no espaço público angolano. Pois a nação hoje entendida como Angola, é em grande parte fruto das ações desenvolvidas pelos movimentos cristãos na região e também dos pensamentos teológicos e educacionais obtidos pelos, então, líderes dos movimentos de independência da Angola ou mesmo pela população em geral. Deste modo, para tratar do tema supracitado, dividiu-se o presente trabalho em três capítulos. Sendo que no primeiro capítulo se fez a abordagem histórica do protestantismo em Angola: trazer as vertentes teológicas bem como as origens das igrejas existentes em Angola será o foco neste primeiro momento. No segundo capítulo procurou-se mostrar o processo de descolonização em Angola assim como as tensões sociais e políticas desde 1961, passando pelas origens dos partidos de Independência e pela guerra civil que duraria desde 1975 a 2002. Por fim, no terceiro capítulo, a preocupação passou em demonstrar de que forma se dá a presença das igrejas protestantes na formação do Estado angolano, para além de assinalar algumas possibilidades de atuação da igreja na esfera pública angolana.

Palavras-chave
Angola; missões; Igrejas protestantes; Cristianismo e política; Teologia pública.

This theme becomes from Public Theology and it intends to reflect christian faith in Angolan public space. This nation called Angola, has in its history, lots of actions developed by Christian movements in the region that were influenced by theological and educational thoughts adopted by their independence movements leaders. The same happened to the population in general. The first chapter was presented the historical approach of Protestantism in Angola. The origin of the existing churches and its theological aspects will be discussed in this first part. The second chapter worried to show the process of decolonization in Angola as well as social and political tensions since 1961, through the origins of the Independence parties, and the civil war, from 1975 to 2002. Finally, in the third chapter, the concern was to demonstrate how the Protestant churches are present in the formation of the Angolan State, discussing some possibilities of its actions in the Angolan public sphere.

Keywords
Angola; Missions; Protestant Churches; Christianity and politics; Public Theology.

Given the evidence of black suffering more than two and half decades after apartheid, this paper proceeds on the premise that theology cannot continue as business per usual. It attempts to stage a critical and creative encounter between the radical theology of the philosopher, John D. Caputo and the liberation Christology of the South African theologian, Takatso Mofokeng. It demonstrates both the commonalities and limits of their respective accounts and suggests that radical theology and liberation Christology supplement each other in critically-constructive ways. Liberation Christology’s criticism of power, institution, and Western modes of theological discourse, which it shares with radical theology, supplements the latter’s somewhat abstract account of “the event” with the particularity of black experience. Radical theology, on the other hand, offers black Christology a way to be critical of its own metaphysical claims, as well as its tendency to mimic the oppressor in its categories of positive identification.

The Reformed tradition helped provide the rationale for Southern slavery and for South African apartheid. If Reformed theology is going to speak to the racial issues of our day, it must come to terms with the tradition of Black theology. Some Reformed evangelical theologians have begun to engage with the insights of Black theologians, but they have done so very selectively. Reformed Evangelicals need to learn from the theological imaginations of such Black theologians as James Cone and Allan Boesak. By doing so, they can undermine the tradition’s racist legacy and unleash its liberative potential.

This chapter identifies a substratum of self-titled "professors of Oriental and African mystic science" who collaborated with each other and created new identities in the context of the marketplace, the Marcus Garvey movement, Orientalism, and influences as diverse as occultism, Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, Anglo-Israelism, Judaism, and
Islam. The specter of African Americans adopting and using Orientalism puts a different twist on the concept.  The discourse of civilization was rarely simply rejected or resisted outright; rather it was recycled and reformulated. For at least some African Americans, adopting Orientalist identities could express anti-imperialist political sympathies, expand personal freedom, and even allow criticism of the West's conceit to be more civilized and technologically superior to the rest of the world.

Black Orientalists triangulated between dark and light by reaching outside of America, in an attempt to overcome American racism and criticize the dominant discourse of civilization.  The work shows that Harlem's networks of religious practitioners used religious, magical, and ideological systems to help create Black Israelism, Rastafarianism, Father Divine's movement, and some early forms of Black Islam. Orientalism is a construct that can help us to reconceptualize and reconnect many of the "Black Gods of the Metropolis."  Read in the larger contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the migration of rural
peoples into the quickened pace of Northern cities, this approach suggests that there was a rich substratum of working class cultural creativity that deserves to be read into the history of the literary and artistic Harlem Renaissance.  It challenges us to think of working class African Americans not merely as workers or migrants, but as organic intellectuals capable of voicing their own dreams, mysticism and religions that were articulate responses to the key concerns of the age.

The objective of this essay is to investigate the public function of Christian theology in the (politico-theological writings and hermeneutics of James H. Cone. It is also to articulate a critique of white American theology. In Cone's work, Christian theology is expressed as a public discourse and testimony of God's continuing emancipa-tive movements and empowering presence in society with the goal (1) to set the oppressed and the vulnerable free, (2) to readjust the things of the world toward divine justice and peace, and (3) to bring healing and restoration to the places in which volitional (human) agents have inflicted pain, suffering, oppression, and all forms of evil. This essay is an attempt to imagine creatively with new hermeneuti-cal lenses and approaches-anti-imperial, liberative, and postcolonial-the task of Christian theology as public witness to carry out the emancipative agenda and reconciling mission (salvation, healing, hospitality, wholeness, reconciliation, and peace) of God in contemporary societies and in our postcolonial moments. The basic argument of this essay is twofold. First, it contends for the essential role of liberation theology as a public witness in redefining Christian theology in general. Rather than being a "special interest" or merely political theme in theology, it suggests that black liberation theology has a special role to play in "freeing" Christian theology from racism , oppression, and imperialism. Second, by promoting some new understanding of Cone's work and applying it in some new context, this article is deploying Cone's public theology to critique or awaken dominant white theology to a new way of thinking about the whole field of theology in the 21st century.

Christian theology will be poised to play a constructive role in the current social transition in South Africa only insofar as it is capable of patiently listening to and being shaped by people's anger. The article aims at mapping a renewed prophetic theology in South Africa focusing on the significance of anger, and based on the theological framework inherent in the Kairos Document (1985). I refer to the three-tier distinction between state, church and prophetic theology to describe the economically-based alliance of politics and ecclesia in today's South Africa. This is followed by a reflection on the significance of anger in the emerging of people's (incipient) theologies which are then articulated as prophetic theology.

This study seeks to compare and assess the Christological insights of Nico Koopman and Tinyiko Maluleke, as representatives of public theology and black theology based on their engaged-prophetic character. Graham Ward fosters a way of 'engaged' theologising, which, [G]ives due attention to our historical, cultural, and social placement … a mode of theological enquiry concomitant with the incarnation of God in Christ and the Church as the body of Christ involved in the operations of redemption in and through the materialities of our embodiment and our cultures (Ward 2016:ix). The Christological considerations of Koopman and Maluleke are measured also according to their prophetic potential, namely, in terms of their ability to spell out an alluring, inviting vision of an alternative community based on the principles of the reign of God and to offer courageous criticism where the status quo does not adhere to that vision, in particular where power is abused.

In this paper, I enter into conversation with theologian Amaryah S. Armstrong on the question of Black queer theology. In agreement with Armstrong, I argue that theological possibilities arise when a Black queer theology refuses to uncritically rehearse theological ideas forged within a hegemonic Christian social imaginary. However, I argue that theological possibilities for a Black Christian theology arise from Black queer people's encounter with the foundation that is Jesus Christ, the one and only criterion by which all Christian theological concepts---queer and otherwise---must be measured. I contend that a Black queer theology is a necessary, insufficient practice for Black queer Christian life if such a practice is not shaped in and caught up by the Spirit into the life of the Son of God. Therefore, from this pneumatic, christologically-concentrated position, I argue that a Black queer Christian theology may adequately speak justly to the existence of Black queer people.

This paper will look at the way the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem have utilised the theological narrative of marginalisation in their quest for identity and self-determination. The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are an expatriate black American group who have lived in Israel since 1969, when their spiritual leader, Detroit-born Ben Ammi, received a vision commanding him to take his people back to the Promised Land. Drawing on a long tradition in the African American community that self-identified as the biblical Israelites, the African Hebrew Israelites are marginalised in their status as Americans, as Jews, and as Israelis. We will examine the writings of Ben Ammi in order to demonstrate that this biblically based motif of marginalisation was a key part of his theology, and one which enabled his movement to grow and sustain itself; yet, in comparison with other contemporaneous theological movements, Ben Ammi utilised a specific variant of this motif. Rejecting the more common emphasis on liberation, Ammi argued for an eschatological reorientation around the marginalised. This article will conclude that Ben Ammi's theology is key to understanding how the community has oriented itself and how it has proved successful in lasting 50 years against both internal disputes and external attacks.

This article investigates the possibility of communicating racialized suffering in meaningful and transformative ways among the triracial hierarchy now present in the U.S.  The author argues that a theological tool, an analogia vulneris (analogy of the wound), may assist us to resist the gravity of the abyss of Whiteness into which we are drawn. The author suggests that the Catholic principle of analogical speech about God may be reoriented to enable individuals and groups to communicate and to create community through their wounds. The author engages with sociology and the history of racial formation in the U.S. to describe how Whiteness functions as an idolatrous space with gravity to be resisted.  The author concludes that an analogia vulneris may enable “Whites” and “Honorary Whites”, in particular, to foster a historical-critical religious racialized consciousness and to create paschal communities of resistance to Whiteness that are glimpses of Christ’s wounded, resurrected Body.

Christian theology will be poised to play a constructive role in the
current social transition in South Africa only insofar as it is capable
of revolutionizing people’s love while patiently listening to and being
shaped by their anger. In this article, I offer the comparative study
of Public theology and Black theology as the best candidates to
embrace such a radically prophetic voice. The main discrepancy
between the two approaches lies in the different trajectories of
their “revolutionizing effect.” Public theology tends to explore the
redemptive, unifying and humanizing potential of Christian love,
yet fails to thoroughly deconstruct the imperial power structures
which are the ultimate cause of the anger of the structurally
disenfranchized majority of South African people. Black theology,
rooted in a postcolonial rather than postmodern perspective, has
the capacity to be vulnerable to the moods of the marginalized
and organic with their rage, yet it lacks coherence and a plan of
action.

Rev. Albert Cleage’s contemporary and counterpart, Dr. James Hal Cone, emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a premier academic voice in Black theology. Cone and Cleage’s collegiality is complicated. Yet, their works on Black theology and Black power complement each other when read in contrast. This essay looks intently at excerpts from Cleage’s sermons, “Brother Malcolm,” and “Dr. King and Black Power” and puts them in conversation with excerpts from Cone’s book “Martin and Malcolm in America.” This work shows the variance in perspectives and theological convictions, as well as the rhetorical strategies employed by Cleage and Cone to make their case for the most faithful engagement to Malcolm and Martin’s contributions to civil rights, Black power, and Black theology.

Resumen Este artículo hace un inventario histórico por los diversos períodos de elaboración teoló-gica negra, hasta presentar las tendencias o tipos de teología que se desarrollan hoy en el continente latinoamericano y caribeño. Palabras clave: Teología, negra, Vaticano II, liberación Black Theology of Liberation: Notes about the 50th anniversary of Vatican II This article makes a historic inventory for the several periods of black theological elaboration , to show the trends or types of theology that are developed in the Latin American and Caribbean continent today.

Building on the creative, astute and necessary methodological restlessness of Black and African Black theologies, this essay argues that the time  has come for African Christianity to come of age, and speak in its own name. In short, African Christianity should no longer be seen merely as a 'type'  of  European or American Christianity, but rather as a complete system and a religion in its own right.

This bibliography explores histories of African American Christianity, inclusive of important texts on African American hermeneutics and African American theology. African Americans have played an important role in the history of mission within World Christianity; some of those stories are included here as well.

The first section of this bibliography focuses on African American missionaries and missiology. The second section contains everything else (histories of African American Christianity, African American Christian Theology, African American Hermeneutics, etc.).

Note that my “African Biblical Theology, Commentaries, Hermeneutics, & Homiletics” bibliography includes a short section dedicated to African American Biblical Theology, Commentaries, Hermeneutics, & Homiletics; that has more in depth coverage for that topic..

latest revision:  30 December 2023

While Judith Casselberry is an outsider to Black Apostolic Pentecostalism, the anthropologist and Africana studies scholar demonstrates the same attentive and caring labor she narrates and theorizes among women in the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith (or cooljc) in her new study, The Labor of Faith. Set in a converted, storefront church in the New York borough of Queens, Casselberry's ethnography traces the transnational and multi-generational women in a local cooljc affiliate church, True Deliverance Church of the Apostolic Faith. Casselberry's project distinguishes itself from a variety of studies on both Pentecostal women and/or black and African diasporic women by paying attention to conceptions of labor. There have been many studies on Pentecostal women both in the u.s. (Elaine Lawless, R. Marie Griffith), and globally (Diane Austin-Broos, John Burdick). Moreover, black Pentecostal women have started to receive more scholarly attention, after the pathbreaking, but Baptist-dominated scholarship of historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. The work of sociologist Cheryl Townsend-Gilkes, and much later historian Anthea Butler, who both studied Pentecostal women in the predominantly black Church of God in Christ are valuable interlocutors for Casselberry. But by paying attention to labor, Casselberry is able to shine light on practices that construct raced and gendered identities of the women in cooljc, while eschewing theoretical concepts like "agency," which often produce an all or nothing at all approach for women's empowerment or autonomy. Moreover , labor enables Casselberry to articulate the deeply embodied and affective work women do to fashion themselves as saints. For Casselberry, labor is articulated in three distinct ways: emotional labor, intimate labor and aesthetic labor. Importantly, through concepts of labor, the hard work of the women is neither interpreted primarily as exploited by men, nor reduced to how these women are situated within the so-called secular world. Casselberry writes, "This study is … set apart from earlier works because my interest lies more in the circumstances of producing a holy Black female per-sonhood within faith communities and less in the connection of the religious worlds of Black women to social, civic, and political activism." (5) This approach is not "otherworldly," however, as Casselberry immediately opens the book with a group of women doing deep cleaning at the home of one of their church sisters , a younger saint, who has just died of a brain tumor. The physical labor of sweeping, and mopping, cooking and sanitizing the home of this single mom,

This article builds on my recent engagement with James Cone’s binary view of Africanness and Christianity which focused on his Western locus of enunciation and the criticism he received from his African American colleagues. I believe that analogical questions regarding Christian theology’s attitude towards Africanness in general and African religiosity in particular present themselves to us who live in and try to make sense of South African reality today, including white people like myself. I start by introducing a decolonial perspective as it manifests itself through the recent #MustFall student movements. In this context, I offer three theses regarding the decolonial perspective on African religiosity, each of which constitutes a more or less direct critique of Cone’s ambivalent attitude towards Africanness, and African Traditional Religions in particular. The first thesis concerns the distinction between postcoloniality and decoloniality; the second thesis concerns engaging African religiosity as a requirement for decolonising Christian theology; and the third thesis concerns problematising the relationship between the categories of blackness and Africanness.

This article builds on my recent engagement with James Cone’s binary view of Africanness and Christianity which focused on his Western locus of enunciation and the criticism he received from his African American colleagues. I believe that analogical questions regarding Christian theology’s attitude towards Africanness in general and African religiosity in particular present themselves to us who live in and try to make sense of South African reality today, including white people like myself. I start by introducing a decolonial perspective as it manifests itself through the recent #MustFall student movements. In this context, I offer three theses regarding the decolonial perspective on African religiosity, each of which constitutes a more or less direct critique of Cone’s ambivalent attitude towards Africanness, and African Traditional Religions in particular. The first thesis concerns the distinction between postcoloniality and decoloniality; the second thesis concerns engaging Afric...

Vincent Lloyd's 2016 book Black Natural Law presents four case histories in which African American intellectuals used the natural law tradition to mount defenses of the rights, capacities, and dignity of members of their communities. This essay uses the discourse of black natural law as reconstructed by Lloyd to reread Caliban's political arguments and social and aesthetic project in The Tempest. Although the natural law tradition became increasingly secularized during the century of revolution, black thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. drew on the religious renditions of natural law that were alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reading Shakespeare with black natural law is not simply an audacious leap into our troubled present, but also brings new focus on the forms of scripturally-inspired pluralism that natural law theory supported in Shakespeare's age.