"The Decline of African American Theology": A Review

Thabiti Anyabwile is the pastor of First Baptist Church in the Grand Cayman Islands. Before serving there, he served as a staff minister in churches serving the Washington, DC area. He grew up in the segregated south, which caused him to foster a genuine anger and hatred for white people, a hatred he would often associate with black pride. He converted to Christianity in the Washington, DC area, being exposed to the Reformed tradition. Anyabwile can be considered a conservative, with a Calvinistic persuasion seen clearly in his present work, The Decline of African American Theology. This review will summarize his argument and attempt to place him in conversation with his contemporaries and critique his work on the basis of his own authority and his handling of black theology.

The author wishes to chronicle the decline of African American theology, beginning from 1600 to the present. He tackles this task systematically by dealing with central issues within Christian doctrine. In a nutshell, Anyabwile attempts to show that black theology is rooted in orthodoxy.

In the North, African Americans were heavily influenced by Puritans, Anglicans and Reformed thinkers; therefore, they spoke of revelation in terms of general and specific. In the South, inheriting the southern resistance to Anglican influence, they spoke of revelation in terms of dreams and encounters—experiential, while still holding high views of the Bible. From there, he basically argued that such a view could not sustain with conservative theology’s stance on race and treatment of blacks and liberal theology’s welcoming of blacks into their institution. He argued, however, that the theological task of orthodox blacks before the civil war was to show, by Scripture, the white church’s misuse of the Scripture and assert the proposition that knowing God and knowing the Scripture is to know true happiness. From here, he critiques the developments of Cone and then the word-of faith movements, respectively. Cone dominates the late 60’s and early 70’s while charismatic movements dominate in the late 70’s to the present. Howard Thurman is a precursor to both.

From the doctrine of revelation, he moves to the doctrine of God. For the most part, the conversation developed is one centered on sovereignty as an answer to the question of slavery. The Sovereign God allowed such injustice as a means for those enslaved to meet Him. Further, liberation and freedom belonged to him. Therefore, the only task of the slave was to watch God work out His will. He begins with this as the orthodox view, and moves into concepts of revolt and views of God centered ideas of liberation. Included in this vision is a vision of Howard Thurman’s pantheistic vision of God, who shows up anywhere.

Anyabwile offered a quote by Thurman, wherein Thurman was commenting on how he went off into seclusion and sat in silence, being one with nature. The longer he sat there, the longer he recognized God in the silence and in the stillness. For Anyabwile, this rang with pantheism; which may be unfair.

When Anyabwile wants to talk about African American anthropology, he begins with the early sermons that stressed the equality of man under sin. For him, the early concept of African American anthropology did not make the case for equality from the common value of all humanity. Rather, he makes such a case from the common fallibility of all humanity. From there, African American anthropology moves to the brotherhood of all humanity, the idea that just as God is man’s common Father, so also is man tied to each other in brotherhood. In the middle of the twentieth Century, African American anthropology begins to take on more exclusionary language to highlight the problem of racism.

Anyabwile also deals with Christology, soteriology and Pneumatology in the same light. His basic contention is that as time has progressed, and as orthodox Christianity has been stewarded by proponents of white racism, the black theological experience has declined in that it has developed reactionary theologies and has taken up the theological identities of more amiable, but unorthodox, Christian expressions. Major players in the theological change for Anyabwile are Jupiter Hammon and Lemuel Haynes on the orthodox end, and James Cone and Howard Thurman on the other end. In a systemic sense he seems to be making two assertions; one I can affirm and one I must deny.

The first assertion seems to be that the African American religious tradition has orthodox roots. On the surface, such an assertion is quite normal. However, in making such an assertion, he is combating a common attempt at revisionist history that seeks to root the black religious experience in America with that of its African ancestry. What seems crucial, however, is a clear estimation on how this orthodoxy morphs over time. Interestingly, he marks a stunning ictus in the thought of Marcus Garvey, who emphasized the emergence of new thought, which informs the rise of prosperity theologies within the black church. He also gives much credence to the work of James Cone, whose basic method seeks to marry the theology of King with the theology of Malcolm X to offer a theology for the Black Power movement. It is safe to conclude, therefore, that the mainstream of black thought held on to a considerable orthodoxy until the end of the Civil Rights movement. I say this because of the strong activity of the black Church in the early to mid 20^th century, which may prove more influential than Garvey.

I affirm this assertion of black orthodoxy; however Anyabwile’s Calvinism might not be satisfied by what I call orthodoxy, which is where his second assertion seems to focus. For Anyabwile, orthodoxy means orthodox Calvinism as expressed through the Puritan and Presbyterian theologians of the North. This proves a cause for concern, because of the limited framework by which he develops his argument. For him, the Northern Christians possessed the seat of right theology, while the southern Christians had a distorted and folk interpretation of the same. This logic clearly ignores the involvement and struggle of the Free Church, which included black Baptist pastors of all stripes, widely forgotten in his theology.

To this point, he understands the emergence of Pentecostalism as a black reality. This builds on the logic that southern blacks contribute a spiritual element to black theology that is real, vibrant and evolves over time into Pentecostalism. Perhaps this does not adequately adhere to Pentecostal history. In fact, most Pentecostals, even though segregation became an unnecessary inevitability within their movement, would strongly affirm that it developed as an interracial movement.

I also question his emphasis on scholars divorced from the life of the black church. His emphasis on Thurman and Cone evince an excessive concentration on scholars whose works are ultimately at the fringes of theology, best utilized as sharp critiques or radical expressions in conversation with orthodox theology. For example, had Thurman’s work been more influential, I imagine he would be studied more widely and there would be more universalism within the black church. The reality is, however, that 20^th century theologians like Thurman and Cone have not had as central an influence to black theology as some might imagine.

This may seem hard to believe, if one were to follow this assertion up with a question on the language of liberation. Most black preachers might say that they affirm liberation theology, having at the forefront of their minds the comments made by Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 election or the scattered quotes and lectures of James Cone. To be honest, this is where my affirmation of it existed. It is, in fact, the point at which I agree with many tenants of it. True Christianity is a faith that is not expressed in physical power but transcendent power in us expressed through our witness of the gospel. Therefore the West’s thirst for power, which drives the church to mutate the Christian religion into one that endorses domination and oppression, should be condemned as foundationally sinful. Such is a powerful statement in much of black theology. Therefore, I affirmed black theology without knowing what it really was. After reading the works of Cone, I discovered that nothing exists within his work, beyond the aforementioned contention, that adequately adheres to doctrines that I could affirm. The same observation could be made about Thurman. Black people affirm them, in that they are figures in black history who contributed to the body of knowledge, but may not agree with what they said once they actually read their works.

To this point, I would have preferred Anyabwile engaged the largest expression of black theology within American history, which seems to be our development of worship. The slave songs intertwined the reality of their oppression and the deep struggles of the eternal with the eschatological promise of justice and reward. The hymns of our tradition were reinterpreted to cohere to our expression. We have even changed the lyrics to many of them, such as Near the Cross. Whereas our white brethren have ransomed souls; we in the black church have raptured souls. Such is a reinforcement of our real expectation to experience Jesus completely. The gospel music of Dorsey and Cleveland spoke to a wounded community who knew from where to draw strength. The rise of the National Black Anthem declared God as the one who ruled over our “weary years and silent tears” and as the one who has “brought us thus far on the way.” This was reinforced by preachers like Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Dr. Joseph Jackson, Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, Rev. C.A.W. Clark and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., although a theologically liberal revision of King’s ministry would highlight his work as a civil rights leader and early dissertations where he gave a soft consideration for figurative interpretations on the resurrection. The preaching of King, toward the end of his life especially, testified of a confessing Christian who took his function as a minister and Christian preacher seriously.

To conclude, not much accounts as an adequate explanation of how slaves, devoted to tribal religions, became Christians. The only example they had for such were their slave masters who behaved brutally toward them. Yet and still, African Americans have largely devoted themselves to the Christian faith. Many secular sociologists would claim that this happened over time as a pacifier to their slave condition. While such a claim could account for a coercive or customary move to faith, it fails to account for the genuine spiritualism within the black community. To put it bluntly, nobody loves Jesus like black people do. No coercion caused this, nor did any pacifying surrender. Only a community of the genuinely encountered, genuinely addressed, genuinely comforted, genuinely advocated, genuinely converted and genuinely set free could love Jesus like that. The true task of the church which ministers to the black community remains to powerfully and sincerely remind them of the God whom their ancestors fell powerfully in love with, and to proclaim to them that this same love is still real today.  

 

Rev. Samuel J. Doyle is a teacher–preacher, and currently serves as the Youth Pastor at the East Saint Paul Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.