Working Against the Grain

Re-Imaging Black Theology in the 21st Century

Anthony G. Reddie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781845533854
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317490487
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christianity has been both the cause of oppression among Black communities and a source of liberation. Black Christianity has sought solace in the redemptive figure of Christ in its struggle for human dignity and freedom. 'Working Against the Grain' addresses the displacement of Black theology in Diasporan African churches by charismatic and conservative neo-Pentecostalism. The essays present a radical Black theology that empowers disenfranchised Black people whilst challenging White power to see and act differently. 'Working Against the Grain' is an essential text for all those interested in the pursuit of racial justice and other forms of anti-oppressive practice, both inside the church and beyond it.

1 Defending Black Theology from Homogeneity

This book is a collection of themed essays. It has been undertaken by an embodied, self-conscious individual who is alive to the fact that as a subject in history, his life has been informed by the ebbs and flows of historical processes that have shaped his own existence and those of many others. I do not write, think, love, sometimes hate or simply exist in a vacuum. So who is the “I” at the centre of this work, which is attempting to work against the grain?

These essays are linked in their attempt to outline a new vision for a liberative model of Christianity built upon the insights of Black theology. The various pieces offer a series of vignettes for the promulgation of Black theology.

The work has emerged from the development of my eclectic teaching and workshop programmes (principally in theological education and local church contexts), where I have continued in my pioneering work of linking Black theological content with transformative pedagogy. The use of experiential models of learning, coupled with my developing thinking around Black theology, has led to a growing body of reflections that has been used to raise the critical consciousness of participants within formal and informal learning environments.

Locating Myself

As a contextual theologian I am always wary of the people who do not locate either themselves or their work within any particular social or cultural milieu when they begin to explicate their ideas. I shall not make that elemental mistake.

I am an African Caribbean male Christian. I was born in Bradford West Yorkshire in 1964. My parents arrived in Britain in the late 1950s from the Caribbean island of Jamaica as part of the mass migratory movement of predominantly Black people from the so-called “New Commonwealth.”¹

Alongside my cultural and ethnic identities (I am at once informed by West Yorkshire sensibilities, the Caribbean and being Black), there also my religious, denominational and spiritual heritages to be considered in the complex hybridity that is a generic part of what it is to be human.² My religious and denominational heritage is located within the Wesleyan Methodist tradition. I was baptized in the Christian Church in the spring of 1965 at Prospect Hall Methodist Church in Bradford. When this church closed, my family and many others decamped to Eastbrook Hall Methodist Central Mission in Bradford town centre. There I spent the next fifteen years of my life before I left Bradford in 1984 to read History at the University of Birmingham. In a previous piece of work I have stated that I am much more Methodist than I care to admit and rather too Methodist than is really good for me.³ My work as a Black British theologian and Christian educator has been and continues to be informed by the denominational and religious tradition into which I have been socialized. This can be seen in my previous work, such as Growing into Hope, just as Robert Beckford’s work is influenced greatly by his Pentecostal roots.⁴ My own roots and identity have been shaped by Methodism. I was nurtured into and have imbibed Methodist values in my understanding of self, God, education, notions of social progress or advancement and, of course, how one “does theology.”⁵

What to Call Ourselves?

In line with my own positionality and the sense of subjectivities that I inhabit and with which I identify, I have used my preferred nomenclature of “Black” in order to describe myself and the subjects at the heart of this book. I am aware of the myriad complexities in the self-naming processes of Black people of African descent. Hence, my struggle in trying to decide what naming strategies I will employ when seeking to name the people at the heart of this study. For some, “Caribbean British” is their nomenclature of choice.⁶ For many others, a variety of terms could be employed in their attempts to name their existential self.⁷ Elsewhere, I have argued that self-definition and self-naming is essentially an existential act of being human and the exercising of free will.⁸

Throughout this text I have used the nomenclature of “Black” with which to name myself and other people of African descent, whose subjectivities are the major cause for this text to be written. In using this term, I am not seeking to impose my preferential subjectivity onto others. I respect the naming strategies employed by persons of African descent, irrespective of whether it is a designation I like or is one that I might use.

Naming is an existential act and, as such, should be beyond the strictures or the “thought-policing” tendencies of others. But in using this term “Black,” I want to suggest a very particular positionality for the people whose lives and experiences have assisted in shaping this book. As I will argue shortly, not everything that is done in the name of and by people of African descent can be named “Black theology.” In much of my early work as a Christian educator, my concern was to create resources that would assist Black people in the formation of a version of Christianity that was consonant with the central tenets of Black theology.⁹ Even at that early juncture, I was not interested in educating people about and inducting them into normative Christianity. Rather, the specific intentionality of Black theology was the preferred medium in which the articulation of Christian faith was to be explored and expressed.

The intentionality of the term “Black” as a subversive and thematic challenge to the notion of “White” and Whiteness has been explored by a plethora of Black theologians. Using such nomenclatures as “Caribbean” or “African,” whilst very suggestive, do not necessarily outline a specific, unambiguous positionality vis-à-vis the individual or the groups who deploy these terms. To put it bluntly, tyrants can be “African” and “Caribbean.” They can claim identity with the context, the history and the experience, alongside the many others with whom they share that particular designation.

I am sure that others would say the same for the term “Black.” I have no doubt that one could argue that Black is no more immune from contamination and mis-representation as are the other terms employed by people of African descent in Britain. What has always drawn me to the term Black is its iconoclastic status, particularly when applied to the word theology. As has been argued elsewhere, Black can function as a political signifier, encompassing all peoples who might describe themselves as the socially-constructed other in “Postcolonial Britain.”¹⁰ Yet, on other occasions, Black simply denotes people of African descent. These terms are often used interchangeably.

In my own work, I often use the more politicized and global meaning, as witnessed in my co-edited work with Michael Jagessar entitled Postcolonial Black British Theology,¹¹ and in the monthly “Black Theology in Britain Forum,” which meets monthly at Queen’s and is chaired by myself.¹² Conversely, in my own solely authored work and also in the coedited (again with Michael Jagessar) Black Theology in Britain: A Reader¹³ I have used Black to denote people of primarily African descent, whether on the continent or in the Diaspora. My personal preference for the term Black is that it is specific and yet inclusive of others. It suggests coalition building and solidarity in struggle with others, and yet has a specificity for identifying themes that are central to the collective experience of being “African.”

For many, particularly when juxtaposed with the words “theology” and “Church,” it remains controversial. I hold to the view that, such has been the scandal of Black suffering and oppression, we are called to be nothing less than controversial and iconoclastic. This view is amplified in the chapter on the Black church, which follows at a later juncture in the book.¹⁴ In the words of my deceased friend, Jil Brown:¹⁵ “When we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak, remembering that we were never meant to survive.”¹⁶

The fact that we were never meant to survive as a people seems reason enough for us to adopt terms that are, in themselves, deeply political and uncomfortable. Our presence should never be one that makes others, particularly White hegemony, feel comfortable. In using the term “Black” I know that I am also bound to make many Black people feel uncomfortable, let alone White hegemony. For many Black people, juxtaposing “Black” with “Christian” and “theology” is to commit heresy. Such has been our socialization into and the concomitant imbibing of the overarching negative world view of self-negation; many Black people are unable to accept that their sacred talk of God should incorporate and indeed be informed by the notion of being “Black.”¹⁷

Black People and Christianity

Christianity has long remained something of a conundrum for Black and other oppressed peoples of the world. This global phenomenon has been, in part, both the cause of violence and oppression on the subjugated, dispossessed and marginalized peoples of the world, whilst conversely, being a source for counter-oppressive struggle. Black Christianity has sought to respond to the vicissitudes of life by seeking solace in the redemptive figure of the Christ who has accompanied Black people in their ongoing struggles for human dignity and liberation.

Black theology, working from within a largely (although not exclusively) Christian framework, has sought to offer the much needed tools for this process of re-imaging human life, death and possibilities for a new world. Of late this radical challenge has appeared to have “run into the sand” as the continued rise of charismatic, conservative neo-Pentecostalism seems to have displaced whatever foothold Black theology once had in the theology and working practices of predominantly Diasporan African churches and faith communities.

This text argues that a re-imagined Black theology can enable Christianity in particular and Black Christian faith in general, to recapture the radical intent of this globalized religious framework. The roots of Black faith, for example, lie in a radical appropriation of the Gospel in order that those who are the “least of these” (Matthew 25:31–46) might live, and have that life in all its fullness (John 10:10). That work was a praxis orientated one and was not mindful of either doctrinal purity or biblical literalism. Black Christian faith has for far too long drunk rather too deeply from the well of “Protestant Post-Reformation Evangelical theology” that has largely muted Black Christianity of its embodied radical intent.

I was first introduced to Black theology in the early 1990s. My first reaction upon reading the likes of James Cone and Gayraud Wilmore was to exclaim “So this is the missing link!” Whilst many of my peers have found the central tenets of Black theology troubling or even controversial, I can honestly attest to a sense of relief and excitement upon reading the early work of James Cone et al.

The truth was that my nurture and discipleship in the Christian faith had always been a struggle. This struggle was with the orthodoxy of classical Christian teaching. There were many instances when I found myself secretly railing against the creedal norms of Christianity, aware that as I was doing so, I was at a variance from the central tenets of the faith as understood by history and tradition.

I remember attending a well-to-do church and seeing on display a whole host of well-meaning individuals who would exclaim to being saved and yet seeing within their behaviour all the conspicuous traits of social superiority and racial intolerance. And yet, within the broader contexts of my life in working-class Bradford I met individuals who would never have described themselves as “saved” or being Christian, but whose praxis of life was exemplary. In the teaching I imbibed from my church it was made clear to me that “Only godly people would go to heaven, not good ones.” Yet the truth of my life experience was that I felt more assured and in safer company with the good people than the so-called godly ones.

In more recent times, as I have plied my trade as a Black theologian and religious educator, I have assisted in the development of Black theology as an academic discipline in Britain. At the time of writing, I am the editor of the only international Black theology journal in the world and also the convener of the national Black theology forum in Britain, which meets at the Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham. I am also the only Black British scholar who in the position as a (co)editor of a book series, who can assist in the commissioning of work for publication by Black British scholars. These roles have afforded me the great privilege of being actively involved in what I take to be one of the most dynamic academic movements in Britain.

Again, at the time of writing I am the longest continuous presence at the national Black theology forum, having first attended the forum in the autumn of 1994, some eighteen months after it had first met. I have been an ever present attendee of this forum since that time. I have been the chair of the forum since the autumn of 2003.

In that time, I have seen the development of Black theology grow impressively. There are currently approaching 30 postgraduate students undertaking some form of work in Black theology, linked mainly to the theology and religion department of the University of Birmingham and the Queen’s Foundation where I work.

This book has been written in order to assist in re-invigorating the ongoing development of Black theology in my context and to offer these reflections for comparative analysis with the other major geographical centres where Black theology is undertaken.

This text has been entitled Working against the Grain?, in order to demonstrate the manner in which Black theology at its radical and iconoclastic best has never been afraid to move way beyond the confines of the doctrinal mainstream of Christianity in order to refashion a new notion of faith for the explicit purposes of Black liberation and social transformation.

It is my belief that Black theology can only be understood in this light. Namely, that without a commitment to liberative praxis and social transformation, one may be undertaking a form of important and necessary work, but to describe that enterprise as Black theology is a misnomer. Black theology has a specific identity and methodological intent that is not the preserve of all Black people who undertake the task of doing theology.

I have termed this work Working against the Grain because Black theology is not concerned with “natural flow of things,” such as doctrinal niceties or orthodoxy for its own sake. Rather, Black theology is committed to liberative praxis and social transformation. Doctrine and dogmas may assist us in clarifying what can be described as being “of God” and being in sympathy with and consonant with God’s reign or rule. I am not arguing for a doctrine free approach to religion or the Christian faith. By definition Christianity believes certain things to be true and others to be less true or not true at all. But I am clear, however, that whilst doctrine assists us in discerning this all-embracing and often...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: A Personal Manifesto
• Chapter 1 Defending Black Theology from Homogeneity
• Chapter 2 A Black Theological Approach to Reconciliation
• Chapter 3 Rethinking Black Biblical Hermeneutics in Black Theology in Britain
• Chapter 4 Jesus as a Black Hero
• Chapter 5 A Black Theological Christmas Story
• Chapter 6 Black Churches as Counter-cultural Agencies
• Chapter 7 A Black Theological Approach to Violence against Black People: Countering the Fear and Reality of Being ”Othered”
• Chapter 8 A Biblical and Theological Case for Reparations
• Chapter 9 What is the Point of This? A Practical Black Theology Exploration of Suffering and Theodicy
• Chapter 10 Peace and Justice through Black Christian Education
• Chapter 11 HIV/AIDS and Black Communities in Britain: Reflections from a Practical Black British Liberation Theologian
• Chapter 12 Making the Difference
• Notes
• Index