Dr. Yumri Taipodia

In between 1517–1840, around twenty million blacks were cruelly captured in Africa. By ship, they were transported to America and sold into slavery. It was a profitable income for the traders. While crossing the Atlantic Ocean, many captives died of dysentery, smallpox, and other diseases of those days. To avert the painful moment, some starved themselves to death. To prevent this form of suicide, the traders applied hot coals to their lips to force them to open their mouths and eat. With their arrival on American shores, they were sold and eventually separated from their families.

The new owners forced them, including the old and ailing, to work from sunrise until sunset. For rebellious persons, they were chained and sent to work in the fields. At the will of the master, black women and girls were raped while their husbands and fathers helplessly looked on. They were counted as property, and the “inferior race theory” was developed, which led people to place them somewhere between barnyard animals and human beings. This brutality was one of the saddest chapters in the history of America. The horrible experience of blacks and their descendants serves as the background for understanding contemporary Black Theology or Liberation Theology.

Wrong Justification of Slavery

Initially, evangelization to the slaves was restricted while some believed that knowledge of the Gospel would make them economically productive. In religious assemblies, they would become conscious of their strength and plot insurrection. As a result, whites would no longer be able to hold them as slaves. Some claimed that blacks were less than human, so they would not go to heaven.

They were like any beasts in Noah’s Ark, and blacks had no souls to save, so there was no need to evangelize them. In those days, many Christians tolerated slavery from Paul’s master-slave relationship and based the curse of slavery on the “sons of Ham” (Gen. 9:20–27), who were interpreted to be blacks. Yet missionaries evangelized, and many were saved. A few considered slavery to be for the religious good because it brought unsaved souls to a Christian land for evangelism. Actually, it was Paul’s underlying instruction that slaves should be free (1 Cor. 7:21, 23); Ham’s son Canaan’s descendants later occupied Phoenicia and Palestine—they were Caucasians. The claim of religious good seems to be absurd, as it was cruel and inhuman treatment of the slaves.

Germination of Liberationist Thought

As the number of black converts grew, they began to attain positions in white Christian churches, but blacks were imposed with restrictions on seating, Holy Communion, and property ownership. It compelled them, by the mid-1700s, to develop autonomous congregations of their race and eventually form separate denominations.

In those churches, they interpreted God as the loving Father of slaves who delivered the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, and they considered Jesus as the Savior and fellow sufferer. They gave a dual implication of heaven and the black slaves’ community and sang liberation songs in the presence of their masters. Since the inception of those churches, the seed of liberation theology germinated in a nascent form.

These slave theologies raised many black activists in America. Among them were the notorious slave preacher Nat Turner (1800–1831), who sought freedom through violence, which led him to kill sixty white people, for which he was hanged. The Apostle of Black Theology, Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), spoke of seeing God through black spectacles, which gave a sense of dignity and destiny to Negroes. In 1949, Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited identified Jesus’ life of poverty with poor masses and drew implications from the experience of the minority Jews in the midst of the large Roman-controlled society to the black experience.

Though Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), the noted civil rights leader, had never formally participated in the Black/Liberation Theology movement, yet he advocated nonviolence for social change. He voiced that blacks should liberate themselves from bitterness and feelings of inferiority towards whites. The black militant writer of the 1960s was Albert Cleage, who became popular for the Black Messiah theory, and his sermons set forth his brand of Black Nationalism.

Appearance of Formal Black Theology

After one hundred and thirty years following the execution of Turner, Black Theology emerged as a formal discipline. It began with the “Black Power” movement in 1966; black clergy reconsidered the relationship of the church to the black community. This latest group redefined the role of the church and religion in the lives of black people.

Out of this re-examination, “Black Theology” was born and began to read Scripture through the eyes of their slave grandparents and started to speak of God’s solidarity to liberate the oppressed of the earth. This new theological movement’s liberation theology writer, James Cone, took the black experience as his fundamental starting point for ascertaining theological truth. From the common experience of black people in America, Black Theology emerges as the supreme test of truth.

It is the experience of truth that should be the ultimate authority in religious matters. For him, Christ is the only revelation of God, and He liberated His followers from the bondage of sin, in which blacks experienced God’s liberating work among blacks from whites in America. Cone maintains that Black Theology is the religious counterpart of Black Power. Black Theology is the theological arm of Black Power, and Black Power is the political arm of Black Theology.

Black Power focused on the political, social, and economic conditions of black people. Black Theology puts black identity in a theological context. His liberationist theology was based on God’s action, in which He delivered the Israelites, who were poor and had no privilege in Egyptian society. For him, this same immanent God is spoken of as black since He is found in concrete historical situations, where He works for the deliverance of blacks in America.

Cone affirmed the Chalcedonian creeds: Christ is “truly God and truly man.” With this, he added the role of Jesus as God-Incarnate, whose purpose was to liberate the oppressed. Jesus Christ is God Himself coming into the very depths of human existence for the sole purpose of removing slavery, thereby freeing humanity from ungodly principalities and powers that hinder the human relationship with God. Cone’s controversial Christology was that Jesus was/is black, which was detestable to white society.

He said that, for whites, it was offensive to find big lips and kinky hair, which was equal to Pharisees partying with tax collectors. Cone urged that it was very important for blacks to view Jesus as black. For him, the Resurrection of the black Jesus was a real event that symbolized universal freedom from every present form of earthly woe. Cone viewed sin as a condition of human existence where human beings deny the essence of God’s liberating activity as revealed in Jesus.

It is contrary to the oppressed community or its liberation. For him, salvation is primarily concerned with earthly reality, not only heavenly hope. The salvation of God means seeing subjugated people rise against their oppressors and demand that justice should become a reality now, rather than waiting for tomorrow. He often spoke of Jesus as the Liberator, yet emphasized the human work of self-liberation among blacks, in which hope for divine help was downplayed. Cone maintains that the black church played a major role in the religious and social life of black America.

For him, the black church was the creation of black people out of their daily overwhelming survival in the brutality of white power. For the slaves, it was the sole source of identity and a sense of community. The black church became the only sphere of black experience that was free from white power. Cone rejected the idea that Christianity is primarily concerned with the next world or life after death, but he also emphasized hope in this life. The blessed heavenly hope can become present, thereby forcing us to make changes in this world.

Evaluation

Certainly, one cannot minimize the magnitude of the black experience. Nor is it good to be unsympathetic to the difficulties faced by Afro-Americans in a white-dominated society. Yet it is doubtful that black liberation theologians have a full and legitimate grasp of the maltreatment of their people throughout American history. Imposing the entire black experience upon Scripture may rob Scripture of its intrinsic authority and distort its intended meaning.

In the reverse way, theologians who make black experience all-determinative might make the same mistake that some white racists did during the era of slavery. Just as several whites imposed their experience of the slave-master relationship upon Scripture to justify slavery, in the same manner, some blacks have imposed the black experience upon Scripture to justify their radical views on liberation. Both positions are erroneous.

For blacks to use an experience-oriented methodology is to excuse the kind of method employed by those who enslaved them. It is self-defeating at best. Black theologian Anthony Evans argues that black experience must be seen as “real but not revelatory, important but not inspired.” Like any theology, Black Theology must have a frame of reference that is based on Scripture and not develop out of purely black experience. To produce a biblical liberation theology, Scripture must be the supreme authority in matters of theory and practice. With this methodology, a strong biblical case can be constructed against any form of racism.