In Search of a Black Christianity

Black theology is the only genuine manifestation of Christianity in America today. White theology is basically racist and nonChristian. If there is any contemporary meaning of the Antichrist, the white church seems to be a manifestation of it. It is the enemy of Christ.

Not every Negro Christian would agree with this provocative, militant conclusion of Union Theological Seminary's James H. Cone. Today, however, the black churches of the U.S.-- which have frequently been accused of excessive caution on civil rights -- are rapidly catching up with the secular advocates of Black Power who have created such turmoil in the universities and urban ghettos.

Last week blacks tried for greater in fluence within the United Church of Christ at its biennial assembly in Boston, promoting a Negro pastor for the presidency of the 2,000,000-member denomination and pressing for fuller representation on all committees. In Detroit, representatives of the National Black Economic Development Council met with the executive council of the Episcopal diocese of Michigan to present their demands for reparations for "centuries of oppression." In the long run, though, one of the most significant attempts to give spiritual sanction to the Black Power movement may have occurred last month in Atlanta, where a group of 16 theologians met under the auspices of the National Committee of Black Churchmen (membership: 600) to hammer out a common position.

Irrelevant Heaven. Not surprisingly, efforts to establish a spiritual underpinning for black-church militancy have strong political overtones. The Atlanta statement, for example, closed with Eldridge Cleaver's belligerent manifesto: "We shall have our manhood. Or the earth will be leveled by our efforts to gain it." It spoke of a "theology of black liberation, the affirmation of black humanity that emancipates black people from white racism, thus providing authentic freedom for both white and black people." The 16 scholars implicitly endorsed James Forman's reparations demand on white churches (TIME, May 16) by recalling St. Luke: 19-8, in which Zachaeus told Jesus: "If I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold." They also declared that "the message of liberation is the revelation of God as revealed in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Freedom IS the Gospel. Jesus is the liberator."

The attempt by blacks to construct a distinctively black theology has a strong this-worldly existentialist cast. "The idea of heaven is irrelevant for black theology," says Cone, the author of a recent book called Black Theology & Black Power. "The Christian cannot waste time contemplating the next world, if there is a next." One participant in the session, Preston N. Williams of Boston University, explained: "The black man cannot divorce theology from social action. Whites say, 'That's not theology at all.' The real question is who is going to define the norms of theology." Some Negro churchmen feel that theology created by white men views God's action through honkie eyes, making it meaningless for the Negro situation. Says Methodist Bishop Joseph A. Johnson: "We affirm our blackness, recognize that our experience is authentic and create a theology based on our experience."

Freeing Power. Black theology views the possibility of violence calmly. "As I look at the American scene," says Bishop Johnson, "I see no possible way to change the structures of injustice except through violence. I hope my vision is wrong." The only Roman Catholic present at the meeting, Father Lawrence Lucas of Saint Joseph's Church in Harlem, draws on the "just war" tradition. "Deliberate, planned violence can be morally justified, and violence can play a role in effecting social change," he says.

Nonetheless, some scholars concede that a Christian baptism of violence could have tragic implications for American Negroes. The Rev. C. Shelby Rooks, executive director of the Fund for Theological Education at Princeton, unhappily notes: "A drift toward community separation, toward violence, toward the denial of our common brotherhood with white men that the Gospel proclaims." Black militants may attempt to impose the doctrine of violence on their own community, in which case Rooks predicts that "it is highly likely that there may soon be black martyrs at the hands of black people."

Not all Negro scholars agree with the legitimacy of a separate black-theology movement. Dr. Joseph R. Washington Jr., author of Black Religion, argues that "if you mean by theology a cognitive body of knowledge and a means to intellectually and structurally understand it, then I question if there is a black theology. I tend not to think of theology as experience." But Cone, perhaps the most ardent exponent of an uniquely Negro Christianity, does not agree. "I don't intend to let black theology be a passing fad," he says. "Students for generations to come will be talking about it. If any white theologian wants to talk to us, it's on black-theology terms." He contends that black theology should be a theology of revolution "whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the Gospel to black people under white oppression."

Some theologians feel that such vehement denunciation of white Christians can only lead to a narrowly parochial vision at a time when the need is for wider understanding. As Dr. Rosemary Ruether of Howard University's School of Religion recently wrote in America, an authentic black theology "would understand the genus 'man' as the universal within which it places its own celebration of black humanity. In that form it would be a catholic theology, a theology with universal validity, and not a form of racism."

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