PATRICK D. MILLER
Bibliography
James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective.
Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.
John H. Hayes and Frederick Prussner, Old Testament Theology: Its History and Development.
Henning Graf Reventlow, Problems of Biblical Theology in the Twentieth Century.
———, Problems of Old Testament Theology in the Twentieth Century.
Cross-Reference: Biblical Criticism, Canon, Christian Theology, Covenant, Dogmatic Theology, Election, Incarnation, Justification, Kingdom of God, Law and Gospel, Miracles, Resurrection, Tradition.
BLACK THEOLOGY
During the 1960s, in the midst of the outward progress made by the civil rights movement—and perhaps because of it—the face of America was changed. Much like the sinister vision of William Butler Yeats, some “rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.” In the 1960s, this event was the rise of black power. The term “black power,” as we now understand it, was first given currency by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., at a rally in Chicago in May 1965.
The term “black power” was and remains charged with tremendous emotive energy. It became the rallying cry for black nationalist groups, political radicals, and cultural revolutionaries; as such, it was the hallmark of the break between the black radical movement and the more accommodationist civil rights movement. The central intent of the black power movement was the empowerment of black people.
The need for black power was sharpened by the presence of oppression and racism. Black people historically found themselves the victims of scorn, rebuke, violence, rape, and death because of the color of their skin. This victimization, most sharply felt in slavery and continuing in subtle forms of racism and discrimination, which afflict black people today, denies the humanity of black people as equally endowed creations of God. “Black power” was the call to black people to shed those ideas of inferiority, which racial oppression fosters, and to engage in a struggle to liberate their bodies, minds, and spirits.
The cry for black power was not limited to the streets of urban America or to the “secular” radicals in the black community. It was also heard in the black churches. Many black clergy heard and responded to the anguished cry of the oppressed. For them black power posed a radical challenge to the normative notions of theology and ministry in the black community. Many of these clergy articulated the need for a theology with its focus, content, and method firmly rooted in the struggle for liberation of black people. European and American theology had never taken the suffering of black people as a serious theological issue and therefore was incapable of speaking prophetically in the midst of their oppression. Out of this vacuum black theology in its contemporary form emerged.
Black power was the political source of black theology, but black theology had a spiritual source as well—black religion drawn from the remnants of African traditional religions and slave religion. Although one can speak about these sources as distinct entities, they are inseparable. The traditional Western separation of the physical and the spiritual, the sacred and the secular, is foreign to the African American sensibility. Black religion provides black theology with a worldview and a metaphysical base from which to view the physical world and the social order. It has historically affirmed the inherent worth of black people, their dignity as creations of God even in inhumane situations, and God’s special providential care for them.
Under the circumstances of slavery and oppression in the United States, this slave religion carried with it an inescapable dimension of black radicalism. This radical religion manifested itself in a number of ways. It always sought independence from white control. The growth of slave religion itself was a spiritual form of rebellion and autonomy. The founding of the independent black churches in America was an instance of the seizure of institutional freedom. The emergence of black theology in the 1960s was a continuation of this radical tradition in the form of intellectual freedom from the canons of white theological thought. This radicalism was not limited to the black church but was seen in a variety of social and political expressions in the black community. However, because the black community did not divide the world into the sacred and the secular, the presence of the spirit of freedom in settings other than the ecclesiastical was quite consistent with the African American religious sensibility.
Black religion, especially its creative use of symbolism, gave black theology a distinct language with which to express the deepest convictions and longings of an oppressed people. Its prayers, poetry, sermons, songs, and litanies provided the context for the telling of the black story. The folklore of black people contains stories that are more than entertainment. These stories embody, in narrative form, the historical hope and eschatological confidence of black people. Black theology has always been expressed in the language of black religion and folklore. Because it emerged from the experience of black people, black theology expressed the deepest religious commitments of black people in a language they created. Therefore, black theology could not remain true to its identity and adopt the language of Europe and North America. It had to be expressed as a folk theology.
Black theology is also a biblical theology. A great deal of the religious self-understanding of black people is expressed in biblical language. This biblical language is not simply the result of black people reading and reiterating the Bible. Rather, this language has become an integral part of black self-expression. One must not underestimate the role the Bible played in the formation of the folklore of black people. Biblical images became so interwoven into the fabric of black experience that now it is almost impossible to appreciate black folklore fully without attention to the Bible. The Bible is a text that is not simply the possession of the black church; rather, it is part of the language of the black community as a whole. The Bible became so important for black people in America because in it they saw their own experiences reflected. Therefore, they understood themselves to be a part of the tradition of the faithful of history for whom the Bible was the standard by which fidelity was measured.
Black theology was nurtured in the soil of black religion and blossomed, in its present form, with the black power movement. Until its emergence virtually no attention was given to the effect that a particular social context had on the method, structure, and content of American theology. (A kind of contextual theology that focused on the ideological dimensions of theological thought was fairly well established in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.) It was assumed that theology existed outside the tensions of society, supposedly unaffected by the unjust distribution of wealth and power within society, American theologians had no real interest in the concrete issues of the creation of a more just society. American theologians did not take as their point of departure the most significant social tension in American society—racial oppression. One wonders—in light of DuBois’s prophetic statement that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color-line—how these theologians could overlook it in their work. This omission could be accounted for by examining the social origins of their theologies. Because most American professional theologians were heirs to the privileges of being white and male in American society, the race issue or the issue of gender would not enter naturally into their theological consciousness.
Black theology, however, has always been intrinsic to the struggle for black liberation. It has always been expressed in the idiom of the black community. Thus, black theology is inseparable from its social context or surroundings. This does not mean that black theology is reducible to sociology, ideology, or culture. Rather, it means that black theology is always concrete, applied in a particular situation, by a particular people, and in a particular way. Black theology