Thirteen Turns

A Theology Resurrected From the Gallows of Jim Crow Christianity

Larry Donell Covin

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725266834, 9781725266841
• eBook ISBN: 9781725266858
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

It is remarkable that African Americans, the descendants of slaves, embrace Christianity at all. The imagination that is necessary to parse biblical text and find within it a theology that speaks to their context is a testimony to their will to survive in a hostile land. Black religion embraces the cross and the narrative of Jesus as savior, both theologically and culturally. But this does not suggest that African Americans have not historically, and do not now, struggle with the reconciliation of the cross, black life, suffering. African Americans are well aware of the shared relationship of Christianity with the white oppressors of history. The religion that helped African Americans to survive is the religion that was instrumental in their near genocide.

Chapter 1

The Theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher in Black Religious Thought and Practices

I. Introduction

This chapter will explore the phenomenon of the feeling of absolute dependence and God-consciousness, self-consciousness, feeling of freedom, fellowship of believers, blessedness, outer circle of the church, the elect, personal immortality and afterlife, as well as other theological concepts central to the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, in the context of the black religious experience encompassing African religious heritage, as well as African American religious expression in the United States.

Historically, marginalized African Americans have articulated their experiences relative to God, in their religious rituals and practices, transcendental to liberal Christian experience informed through Enlightenment theologies. More specifically, an exploration of the commonalities and differences between African American religious experience of feeling of absolute dependence and God-consciousness, inherited by African traditional religious experience and lived experience in America, and the feeling of absolute dependence and God-consciousness in Schleiermacher’s theology will be considered. A significant goal of this chapter is to bring Schleiermacher into conversation with black religious experience, and to demonstrate how Schleiermacher’s theology and theological concepts show up in black religious thought and practices.

This author will argue that communities and persons lacking power and franchisement are intrinsically positioned to experience feeling of absolute dependence and God-consciousness, due to their alienation from societies possessing alternatives to reliance upon religion, religious practices, rituals, and religious instructions. As a result, the feeling of absolute dependence and God-consciousness for historically marginalized groups is unobstructed.

This religious state of mind and the feeling of absolute dependence as well as understanding of God-consciousness needs to be explored in new contexts, and in ways which brings Schleiermacher into conversation with divergent and emerging religious experiences vis-à-vis black religious experience. As such, this author acknowledges the risk of engaging theological ideas from the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, with very specific religious experience and language inherent in black religion and thought. The theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher in black religious thought and practices is an attempt to lessen the divide between the two.

II. Schleiermacher / Thurman / Du Bois / McCormack / Mill / Rousseau / Sartre

The African enslaved in America intrinsically imagined and comprehended a beingness which allowed for self-transcendence, a move which created tension with the dialectic of being enslaved, yet possessing an awareness of the freedom inherent in God. The African enslaved possessed an intuition of the universe as Schleiermacher would refer to it as in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. “The standard by which all are measured is that of intuitions of the universe. Whether we have a God as a part of our intuition depends on the direction of our imagination . . . since imagination is the highest and most original element in us.”1 The African enslaved clearly possessed a direction of imagination that synthesized God into his existence. The African enslaved in America had only religious beliefs to sustain herself in the face of relentless denial of her humanity. “A God who is worthy of our belief must be believed in, not because of his potential beneficence but because of an overwhelming necessity that arises from our experience of the world.”2

A feeling of Absolute Dependence upon God would by necessity diminish the dependence upon the one enslaving the African in America, that is to say the slave owner, and would therefore undermine the premise upon which the institution of slavery is built. It is antithetical to the human experience to not possess agency, or to dispossess a subject of autonomy and/or freedom. Despite the postulation of Jean Jacques Rousseau, writing in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, stating that eventually persons confined to a certain condition, will accept his or her condition without attempting to improve upon their circumstances; historic documents and accounts of the earnest yearning of the African to experience freedom negates this account. “Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping them . . .”3

As a subject, the enslaved African is nevertheless bound by a nature informed by the theological understanding of imago Dei, and therefore desires freedom. The rituals and rites found in religious experience facilitate a dependence upon God, a consciousness, as the African understood God; to the extent that his and her self-transcendence could not be contained by either whips, chains or the weaponizing of a pornographic religion as presented by White Christianity. Howard Thurman, writing in The Creative Encounter identifies this consciousness or untouchable reality that is resident in all humanity. “As a person each of us lives a private life; there is a world within where for us the great issues of our lives are determined . . . It is private. It is cut off from immediate involvement in what surrounds us. It is my world.”4

To be a part of humanity is to desire freedom. It is as sentient beings the African enslaved has a consciousness of his or her place, an awareness of freedom even without the experience of freedom. To lack this awareness is to lack being a part of humanity. Writing in The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher observes; “This last expression includes the God-co...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher in Black Religious Thought and Practices
• Beyond Vietnam
• Nicholas Wolterstorff on Faith and Public Life Together
• Reflections upon Nicholas Wolterstorff’s “Education and Public Life Together”
• A Century of African American Excellence
• Reflection on Lynching in Jim Crow America
• Early European Work House and Contemporary Penitentiary in the United States
• The Sunday-School Society and Poverty Relief as Pedagogy in Contemporary Blighted African American Urban Communities
• The Unethical Corrupting of Law and Order in Conversation with Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer and God’s Revelation
• Summary of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope
• On W. E. B. Du Bois and Double Consciousness
• Author’s Note
• Bibliography