Black Theology—Essays on Global Perspectives

Hopkins

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781532608223
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Since its start in 1966, black liberation theology in the United States has continually engaged international developments with Africa and the entire world. But after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, there has been an almost twenty-year break in books on black theology and international affairs. Black Theology--Essays on Global Perspectives bridges that post-1990 gap and makes a vital contact with Africa again.This book conceptualizes black theology to take on the global reconfigurations and opportunities brought about by the rapidly shrinking earth of fast-paced, worldwide contacts. In other words, in the specificity of the genealogy of black theology, we need to reforge ties with Africa. This claim is based on tradition.And in the generality of the larger worldwide intertwining of technologies and economics, we need a new type of black theological leadership for the twenty-first century. This claim is based on today's international challenges.The essays in this book draw on tradition and point forward in the midst of today's worldwide challenges and favorable possibilities, given the closeness of all nations and the varieties of cultures.

Part 1: Black Theology

1

Black Liberation Theology: A Global Origin

Black theology of liberation comes from three related experiences. Theology means the long tradition of the various forms of Christianity beginning with the life of Jesus in what we today call northeast Africa or west Asia. Liberation describes the specific mission of Jesus the Anointed One on earth; that is to say, liberation of oppressed communities to attain power and wealth. And black defines the many examples of black people’s socially constructed worldviews, arts, and identities. In a word, black theology of liberation answers the question: How does Jesus’s gospel of liberation throughout the Christian tradition reveal itself in black culture? Ultimately, arising out of the particularity of the black experience, the goal is to help create healthy communities and healthy individuals throughout the world.

Rooted in the Christian tradition, following the path of Jesus, and affirming black culture, black liberation theology comes from both modern and contemporary contexts.

The Modern Context

By modern context, we mean the historic meeting between European missionaries, merchants, and military, on the one hand, and the indigenous family structures of the darker skin communities of the globe (i.e., the majority of the world), on the other. Bold European explorations made contact with what would later become Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, and the Pacific Islands. Describing these many regions as qualitatively different, Europe then turned itself into a standard map called Europe. The modern context developed many European nation-states while colonizing and removing wealth from and stifling cultural growth of the rest of the world.

For example, we can symbolically, if not substantively, specify 1441 as the beginning of, perhaps, the largest displacement, forced migration, and genocide in human history—the European Christian slave trade in Africa. In 1441, the first group of Africans left the West African coast bound for the Christian land of Portugal. Upon the ship’s return to its homeport, the Africans were given as trinkets to Prince Henry, sovereign of a Christian country. Portugal, indeed, held the first slave auction in 1444.

Subsequently other Catholic states (such as Spain and France) and Protestant countries (such as England and Holland) joined in the physical hunt for the sale of black skins. Consequently, popes blessed the European slave trade, and both Catholic and Protestant clergy accompanied the slave vessels that went forth to do the work of Jesus in Africa.

And then, of course, 1492 expresses a clear sign of modernity. Precisely in the 1492 rise of European modernity, we see the connection of Columbus, the European Christian church, and African slavery. Even before the historic voyage of 1492, a papal bull issued in 1455 praised Prince Henry of Portugal “for his devotion and apostolic zeal in spreading the name of Christ.” At the same time, this decree gave the prince “authorization to conquer and possess distant lands and their wealth.”1 Here a pattern was set that was to support Columbus’s voyage as well as that of every other European slave ship on the way to the west coast of Africa.

Indeed, a brief look at the commission received by Christopher Columbus prior to his first trip reveals the European mindset toward non-European peoples and their lands. On April 30, 1492, Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella wrote:

For as much of you, Christopher Columbus, are going by our command, with some of our vessels and men, to discover and subdue some Islands and Continent in the ocean, and it is hoped that by God’s assistance, some of the said Islands and Continent in the ocean will be discovered and conquered by your means and conduct, therefore it is but just and reasonable, that since you expose yourself to such danger to serve us, you should be rewarded for it.2

In this commissioning, we have the joining of several factors. First, Columbus does not travel abroad as a solitary voyager. He is authorized by the state, the highest authority in the civil and political positions. Furthermore, his assignment is by definition to discover, conquer, and subdue foreign lands. And very importantly, given this definition and the will of the state represented by Columbus, God would assist the victory of European peoples over non-European populations.

What is the reward offered to Columbus for his labors? Ferdinand and Isabella continue:

Our will is, That you, Christopher Columbus, after discovering and conquering the said Islands and Continent in the said ocean, or any of them, shall be our Admiral of the said Islands and Continent you shall so discover and conquer . . . You and your Lieutenants shall conquer and freely decide all causes, civil and criminal . . . and that you have power to punish offenders.3

Thus he receives personal titles of nobility and, with “God’s assistance,” the authority to decide and punish any persons who would disobey his command. With this commission in hand, Columbus departed on July 9, 1492. He wrote in his journal that the inhabitants of the New World would make good Christians and “good servants” for Spain. When Portugal protested this commission to Columbus, the arbitration of this territorial dispute fell not to an international tribunal of lawyers or heads of state but only to the European Christian church.

On May 4, 1493, Pope Alexander VI produced the following papal bull in Spain’s favor. First the pope acknowledged Columbus, who “with divine aid and with the utmost diligence sailing in the ocean sea, discovered certain very remote islands and even mainlands.” Regarding Ferdinand and Isabella, the pope wrote:

And in order that you may enter upon so great an undertaking with greater readiness and heartiness endowed with the benefit of our apostolic favor, we, of our own accord, not at your instance nor the request of anyone else in your regard, but out of our own sole largess and certain knowledge and out of the fullness of our apostolic power, by the authority of Almighty God conferred upon us in blessed Peter and of the vicarship of Jesus Christ . . . , should any of said islands have been found by your envoys and captains, give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors, . . . forever together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdiction . . . , all islands and mainlands found and to be found.4

From the European church perspective, at the dawn of modernity, clearly, conquering and subduing are connected to the act of discovering foreign territory and peoples. Moreover, as theological justification, the pope draws on the authority of “Almighty God,” the “vicarship of Jesus Christ,” the tradition of “apostolic power,” and the leading role of Peter. This gets at the heart of the modern context for the subsequent rise of black theology of liberation. Certain parts of European power (a trinitarian alliance of Christianity, the state, and world discovery) were compelled to ape their God or justify their attempts at economic, cultural, and spiritual domination of the earth’s darker skin peoples. Such a practice leads to spreading the cross and culture to black people. This sector of modern European power would tell dark skin peoples what they could believe and what they could think about their beliefs.

The papal bull closes with these words:

Let no one therefore infringe, or with rash boldness contravene, this our recommendation, exhortation, requisition, gift, grant, assignment, constitution, deputation, decree, mandate, prohibition, and will. Should anyone presume to attempt this, be it known to him that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul.5

The European Christian slave trade of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries (that is, from 1441 to 1888 when slavery was abolished in Brazil) in West Africa forever disrupted the balance of material resources in world history. West African (and North American, Brazilian, Jamaican, and Cuban) black labor (through cotton and other commodities) coupled with European Christian removal of Africa’s raw materials built the British and North American industrial revolutions and created their technological innovations.6 And, in the long view of history, taking the indigenous people’s land and eliminating human populations to near extinction laid the foundation of North America’s superpower emergence.

And after four hundred years of legal chattels, it is no accident that the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference took place with the nineteenth-century legal end of European, Christian, international slavery. Here in Berlin, western European powers (with the American government’s knowledge) carved up which African land areas could be colonized by European countries. Before this conference, a map of Africa reflected vast land areas with somewhat fluid boundaries. After Berlin, the African map was drawn with color-coded countries created and controlled by European nations. By 1902, European powers controlled at least 90 percent of the entire Continent. In contrast to the wealth transfer from Africa and other areas around the world...