Duppy Conqueror

Robert Beckford

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506484396
• eBook ISBN: 9781506484402
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book contours Robert Beckford's recontextualization of African American Black and Womanist theologies of liberation. Making the black British experience a point of departure, Beckford's theological method appropriates two distinct approaches to pursue a contextual theology or a Black theology dub: first, a correlation of linguistic concepts from Black cultural history and urban life (Rahtid, Dread, and Dub) with the theological categories of "God, " "Jesus, " and the "Spirit"; second, a media theopraxis or inscribing of Black theology onto commercial television documentary filmmaking and studio-produced contemporary gospel music.

In the My Theology series, the world's leading Christian thinkers explain some of the principal tenets of their theological beliefs in concise, pocket-sized books.

1

God of the Rahtid

I BEGIN WITH the doctrine of God.

The doctrine of God in Christian theology considers the attributes of God as presented in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Today most theological students in Britain are introduced to the study of God through a western philosophical gaze on categories of thought, including God as personal, impassible, theodical, transcendent, immanent, omnipotent, creator and omniscient. Few students, from the outset, are introduced to contextuality as a defining feature of God-talk.^[18] Therefore, undergraduate students do not have to comprehend how positioning (socio-political and religious cultural factors) inform theological thought. Few theological students in Britain, in my experience, leave university with awareness of how whiteness or coloniality has informed their theological education.^[19] In contrast, in African Caribbean Christian tradition, positionality is primary. Missionary Christianity from Europe and later from North America did not introduce ideas about the Christian God in a neutral or unbiased way in the British-run slave labour camps of Caribbean slavery – on the contrary, the entry of the Christian God is coterminous with racial terror.^[20] For this reason, African Caribbean Christians have always had a sensitivity to the interconnection of theological ideas and social location. For blacks in the West Indies, the meaning of God was intimately related to anti-slavery (Sam Sharpe), anti-imperialism (Paul Bogle) and anti-racism (Marcus and Amy Garvey).^[21] Fast forward to the 1990s, as a black, British, heterosexual male, standing within the tradition of African Caribbean history, my interest in the doctrine of God was, like my forebears, similarly positional, because it was invested in black struggle.

What does the meaning of God have to contribute to the ubiquity of racial injustice in Britain? This question was at the forefront of my mind in the early noughties. While my white contemporaries in the theological academy debated the substance of the Trinity, the relationship between Christianity and Science, the meaning of the ‘Toronto Blessing’, and Christ and culture, I foregrounded the catastrophe of the racial violence visited, both psychologically and physically, on black bodies. Why did I ask this question? Because in the context of late modernity, I witnessed numerous colleagues, friends and family members experience trauma, deep depression and even lose their minds because of racism-induced mental illnesses.^[22] Arguably, from the mid-1990s, the black community experienced a collective trauma in the wake of the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence not dissimilar in recent years, to the global outpouring of grief and rage in response to the killing of the African-American George Floyd in America in 2020.^[23] The question was not just a matter of developing an orthodoxy but was also consideration for orthopraxy – the meaning of God as anti-racist praxis.^[24] In other words, God-talk is not just for the sake of intellectual consistency and ‘truthfulness’ but also to produce practical action against racialized oppression. God and action are a feature of African Caribbean Christianity.

Knowledge of God is discovered through God’s action in the life and events of the believer(s) in African Caribbean Christianity. For instance, in black Pentecostal thought God is defined in terms of God’s action in the world instead of relying solely on conceptual abstraction.^[25] In sum, an experiential theological epistemology underscores Pentecostal ways of knowing,^[26] so that ‘who feels it, knows it’. Many of the songs black Pentecostals of the first generation of colonial citizens in Britain (which are also a rich source of theological thought) emphasize God’s action in the life of the believer and in the world:

God is a good god yes he (sic) is

For he picks me up, and turns me around,

And plants my feet, on solid ground

God is a good god, yes he is.

Moreover, through personal experience believers come to view God as a ‘deliverer.’ For instance, God is expressed as a protector of the vulnerable. As one chorus puts it:

Jesus be a fence

All around me every day

Lord, I want you to help me

As I travel along life’s way,

Lord, I know you can, Lord, I know you will

Fight my battles if I keep still

Be a fence, all around me every day.

Killing Rage

Nuancing my interest in God-talk, more precisely, I wanted to know who God is for those of us who were angry, vexed, and full of rage because of the experience of the slow drip of micro-aggressive discriminations(s) which corrodes wellbeing and bruises the soul. The trauma born of racialized oppression can lead to unmetabolized anger.^[27] Black rage was not expressed homogeneously; because black communities are differentiated by class, gender, sexuality, age, and political orientation. Our lived, intersectional, and trans-dimensional existences mean that all our rage does not come from the same place(s).^[28] Black people in Britain deploy various tactics or politics of transfiguration^[29] to address the rage born of discrimination. The tactics are on a spectrum of thought and action from the ‘separatist discourse’ of the Nation of Islam to the ‘integrationist discourse’ of black conservativism. However, most resistance and re-existence politics in the black community find a home in mainstream liberal politics, which seek civil and legal means of redress, as well as creating supportive spaces and places for the humanizing of black bodies.^[30] Back in the 1990s, African Caribbean Christianity and most of the Black Church tradition in Britain did not have the theological resource to redeem black rage in a meaningful way.

Back in the 90s, black rage in the Black Church was suppressed by two powerful discourses. I term these discourses ‘respectability’ and ‘resisting representation’. Respectability was a spiritual sedative for racialized oppression. Our elders taught us to stay calm, remain dignified and cultivate the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23), especially longsuffering. The second discourse, ‘resisting representation’, describes an embodied opposition to the angry black person trope.^[31] The image of the angry black person is steeped in the long history of violent settler colonialism in the Caribbean and Americas, where suppressing black people was built on the myth of an essentialized black rage. The myth of the angry or animalistic black was integral to the colonial regime’s brutal ‘seasoning’ or ‘breaking in’ of enslaved peoples, especially black women.^[32] In the 90s, in African Caribbean churches, a fear of being seen as ‘too angry’ and de facto ‘too black’ in the face of discrimination produced a ‘protest phobia’. Our response was to live out and enact a black Christian coolness, instead of expressing a verbal or physical anger towards racial attacks.

The suppression of black Christian rage was theologically problematic. Our passivity signified what we believed about God’s action in the world. Because we had no comment on racialized attack, we gave the impression that God was either too far removed from our situation (transcendent, Ps 57:5; 97:9) to notice, or just indifferent (impassible). The consequence of both theological signifiers is a catastrophe: they registered that the meaning of God was incompatible with our anger over injustice, and therefore there was no point getting upset about it in the first place.

Overturning the suppression of rage was essential to reconstructing the meaning of God so that theology speaks into black rage. The pathway for a new vision was twofold. First, to reconceptualize rage as a redemptive force in Christian experience – what I term redemptive vengeance. Second, to correlate redemptive vengeance with a black experience of rage to conceive of a God who is on the side of those with righteous rage or a God of the Rahtid.

Redemptive vengeance

In the Bible, rage is a justified response to injustice. In the New Testament, Jesus expresses anger when faced with the predatory merchants in the temple:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. God of the Rahtid
• 2. Jesus is Dread
• 3. Spirit Dub
• Conclusion: ‘Outernational’
• Acknowledgements