African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology
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African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822378518 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 490 |
| File size: | 980 KB |
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African American Religious Studies
An Interdisciplinary Anthology
By Gayraud Wilmore
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1989 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7851-8
CHAPTER 1
The Development of Black Religion in America
C. Eric Lincoln
When Zedekiah, last king of Judah delivered Jeremiah up to the nervous rabble of his decaying establishment, those so-called "princes," too cowardly to murder the prophet out-right, dumped him into the muck of an abandoned well instead and waited for nature to take its course. Tradition has it that Ebedmelech, the African, rescued Jeremiah and was rewarded by God's promise that in the terrible prospects of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity then in the offing, he, Ebedmelech, would not be delivered into the hands of strangers. There is another tradition that six centuries later, another African whose name was Simon helped Jesus struggle up Mount Calvary under the burden of the cross that was to become the symbol of a New Jerusalem. Somewhere between Jeremiah and Jesus, somewhere between God's promise to Ebedmelech and Simon's travail on the way to Golgotha, somewhere between the death of the Jewish nation and the birth of the Christian religion, tradition takes on a compelling significance, the ramifications of which are now, two thousand years later, set in insistent reverberation. At stake is the religious commitment and the religious identity of millions of Black Christians who want to shuck off their identification with white, American Christianity because the white expression of the faith is not always flattering to Black people and frequently demeaning to them. What Black Americans are now in search of is the reconstruction of an alternative circuitry that avoids the embarrassment of their association with American Christianity and re-establishes their connection with the faith through new understandings of God's will for man and man's willingness to assume responsibility for his dignity and his destiny on earth.
Hence Pentecost takes on new meaning, for among those "devout men from every nation under heaven" who heard Peter proclaim the promise to them and to their children were men from Africa. But as if to underscore divine intention that Black Africa, which first touched the destiny of Israel when Abraham came out of Ur and settled in Egypt and continued through all the centuries thereafter, should be a direct and unequivocal heir to that promise, the divine imperative came to the evangelist Philip directing him toward a rendezvous with the destiny of a people. "Take the desert road that leads towards Gaza," he was told. Waiting for him there with a copy of Isaiah in his hand was a high-born African, treasurer to Her Majesty Candace, Queen of Ethiopia. He invited Philip to join him in his chariot, received the good news from his lips, and accepted baptism at this hand, an act that from the beginning symbolizes the African involvement in the new faith that was to spread throughout the world as "Christianity."
This must be reckoned a momentous event in the history of African Christianity. Whether it has a probable significance for the present mood of Black Americans must depend upon the examination of an extended spectrum of additional factors still to be introduced. At a minimum, however, there is the fact that Christianity found an early and fertile establishment in North Africa, in Egypt, and in Ethiopia, and that the church in Africa gave back to the universal church an extraordinary interest on its investment. We are reminded that during the three hundred years from the third through the fifth century when the church wrestled with its most critical theological formulations, of the eighteen or twenty most prominent leaders, no fewer than nine were African: Clement, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Dionysius, Athanasius, Didymus, Augustine, and Cyril. Cyprian and Augustine were the great intellectuals who worked out the basic political and theological doctrines of the Western Church. How ironic are the whimsicalities of history that so much light should come from so "dark" a continent, and that it should bring sufficient illumination to an incipient faith in an indeterminate culture as to eventuate in a civilization called "the Christian West"; and that in time the Christian West, goaded by an insatiable economic self-interest would turn again to Africa, not to bless her, but to suck her blood. But such are the inexplicables of human history. We soon learn that neither the light of reason nor the illumination of the Spirit is a sure hedge to the predaceousness that is ever the corollary of power; and this irrespective of any categories of race, or geography, or nationality. As fate would have it, the men who caught men (or bought them), and the men who were caught (or bought), were destined to play out their generations against the backdrop of the faith they came to share in a new world informed by latter-day apostles whose understanding of that faith was clouded by an incipient racism, a degraded economics, and an illusion of manifest destiny.
I have said that Africa knew the Hebrew nation in its infancy—from Abraham even—and the civilizations of Africa were ancient even then. It is sometimes necessary to remind Christians in the West that Egypt is in Africa, and that Egyptians are Africans, and that no one in ancient Egypt had the clairvoyance to exclude the Black Africans from history-in-the-making in order to accommodate the wish-theories of our latter-day historians. This could hardly have been accomplished anyway, since the Egyptians themselves are racial hybrids representing a fusion of Black peoples from the South with lighter-skinned races from the North. But the racial composition of the Egyptian people is for our present purposes somewhat beside the point, except that the peculiar convergence of events that brought Africans and American Christianity into a strange concubinage for three and a half centuries tends to bypass and ignore the Black African's ancient role in the development of Egyptian civilization in an effort to deny the Black African a role in human progress and development. This is a perspective that is helped along by practically all Western scholarship through a concerted pedagogical effort to remove Egypt from the continent of Africa and suspend it somewhere between earth and sky until "all the facts are in," which in translation means until some miracle of historical research resolves once and for all the troublesome question of Black influence and participation in the great civilizations of the Nile.
As a matter of fact, the Blacks who came to this country as slaves did not come from Egypt. And few would press such a claim. They did not come from Ethiopia. They came from the coastal states of West Africa. But the Black presence in Egypt, long before the white man came to Africa, whether to conquer, as did the Greeks and the Romans, or to deal in human chattels, as did most of the rest of Western Europe, seems well established. And this despite the frustration it poses for "scholars" with preconceived conclusions about Black history and Black achievement. It is not my present task to seek to validate the relevance of the Black experience in Egypt, but to address another aspect of Black history which begins with the rape of Africa at the hands of successive waves of Christian slavers, and continues to this day in the bifurcation of religious understanding and expression wherever there are white and Black Christians. Our present attention, then, is directed to the Motherland of the Black diaspora, that tortured and plundered Western Shore from which the sea captains of Europe and America took, in the course of four centuries, unnumbered tons of gold, uncounted shiploads of ivory, and millions upon millions of men and women. Black men and women. To the plunderers, Africa was the "Gold Coast"; the "Ivory Coast"; the "Slave Coast" It was never a community of people.
From 638 the Christian influence in Africa was muted by the vast hegemony of Islam. History had to wait for Prince Henry the Navigator, that half-English, half-Portuguese Grand Master of the Order of Christ, to open up the "dark continent" for Christ and commerce, to see the slave trade established in medieval Europe fifty years before Columbus would discover a new Europe where slavery would become normative to the culture for the better part of three hundred years. But Portuguese Christianity cannot support an unchallenged claim to bringing Black slavery to Europe, for, under Enrique III of Castile, gold and slaves from Africa were marketed in Seville in the last decade of the 15th century, and although good Queen Isabella, that canny and daring patron of Columbus, sought unsuccessfully to kill the practice before it was well rooted, she failed in the end. She failed because the prevailing sentiment of the Roman Catholic Church was that it was better for a "heathen" to have his body bound and his soul free than vice versa. So, by 1501 it was possible and profitable for the Spanish crown to issue an edict permitting not only "freshly caught" Africans, but those born in Christianity as well, to be sold in America. At first the notion seemed to be that Christianized Blacks could better convert the Indians, although it was never quite clear why "savages and heathens" should promise greater success in the conversion enterprise than Christians with the seasoning of centuries. Perhaps the fact that slaves from Guinea brought four times as much as Indian slaves in the American market was not altogether irrelevant.
Impressed by the Spanish success, by the end of the fifteenth century Portugal had developed a voracious parasitism which she has continued to indulge since, with only such modifications as changing times and world sentiment have induced her to make. With Africa as an inexhaustible source of supply for free Black labor, Portugal contracted with Spain to provide the Spaniards with slaves for markets Spain had developed in the New World—an obvious Portuguese stratagem to maintain a monopoly on her own very profitable procurements in human flesh. But the neighboring states of Western Europe smelled a good thing, and the Portuguese monopoly was soon fractured by Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Danish, and American competition for live, black bodies from Africa. Labor was short and the market was aggressive. As a result there were 500,000 slaves in the American colonies by the time of the Revolution—an embarrassing statistic patently inconsonant with the brave rhetoric of the founding fathers, to say nothing of the moral principles of an avowedly Christian nation.
Few if any of the slaves brought into the English colonies were Christian, but there were Black Christians with the Spanish adventurers in South and Central America, in Mexico, and in the Spanish settlements in Florida from the very beginning. Not all of them were slaves. Pedro Alonza was captain of Columbus' flagship, the Nina. Estevanica, who explored parts of Mexico and the Southwest with De Vaca, led an expedition into what is now New Mexico and Arizona, where he discovered the Zuni Indians and planted the first wheat crop in America in 1539. Whatever their motives, the Catholic countries—Portugal and Spain especially, were generally anxious to see their slaves baptized; the Anglo-Saxon peoples were not. The Catholics, it seemed, gave a first consideration, however perfunctory, to the demands of the Church. We are told that the Portuguese
sold the performers of heathen rites and gave the proceeds to the poor. The numbers were so great that the slaver depended on the missionary to complete his cargo. Merolla sold a slave for a flask of wine for the sacraments. Even if Negroes had been baptized, the (Catholic) missionary saw no sin in enslaving them. In reality, however, baptism encouraged and sanctioned slavery for it made the Negro a Christian and a man nolens volens, while the Christian slave trade was a beneficent agency to bring black barbarians into Christian civilization. Only, let not the slave be sold to heretics, for then he would be doubly damned.
This was representative Catholicism at work in the slave trade. A bow toward Rome and on with the business at hand, being careful only to have no dealing with the heathen Mohammedans, lest the poor Black souls, already damned for being Black, be damned again for falling into the hands of Muslims. The Protestants bowed only to an incipient racism which, ere long, would develop a ponderous psychology of justification which would burden church and society for generations. The Englishman considered himself first, above all. And when he contemplated his own perfection, he saw the heathenism of the Blacks as being but one aspect of a generalized disparity. Blacks were not simply non-Christian and thereby capable of being made whole through the saving ministry of Jesus Christ. They were beings apart which no amount of grace could raise to a level consistent with the Anglo-Saxons' concept of themselves. Says Winthrop Jordan, "Heathenism was from the Anglo-Saxon's point of view, not so much a specifically religious defeat but as one manifestation of a general refusal to measure up to proper standards, as a failure to be English.... Being Christian was not merely a matter of subscribing to certain doctrines; it was a quality inherent in oneself and one's society. It was interconnected with all the other attributes of normal and proper men."
It was an aspect of the Black man's depraved condition. Since he was not and could not become an Englishman his importance and his place in the Englishman's scheme of things was already determined: for from so haughty and preclusive a perspective the Anglo-Saxon could scarcely be expected to develop a warm appreciation of the African's humanity, his native religion, or his capacity to benefit by Christian instruction.
If the Anglo-Saxon's racial and cultural arrogance had been less peremptory and less categorical, it is possible that he could have learned something from the African which might have given him cause for reflection. The Africans he dismissed arbitrarily as heathen did, as a matter of fact, believe in one supreme God. Above the intermediary gods and spirits which distressed the white man so was always the One God who was the giver and sustainer of life. What the white man dismissed as African ancestor worship was a highly sophisticated expression of love and respect for the family and the recognition of the continuity of its relationships—an observation strangely and unaccountably lost on a people so irrevocably committed to the importance of family continuity as are the Anglo-Saxons. What is more, the African moral codes were consistent with the notion of One God of all people. The slave trader saw none of this. He understood less than he saw, and cared about less than he understood. After all, "the English errand in Africa was not (the search for) a new or perfect community, but a business trip." The great civilizations the Africans had raised at Ghana, at Melle, at Jenne, Songhay and Timbuktu, their art, their religion meant nothing to the men who came bringing chains and Bibles.
In the final analysis, as slavery went, the English were probably no worse than the worst and certainly no better than the best, and the line that separated the one from the other is scarcely discernible from any perspective of human responsibility. Whether Saxon, Spaniard, or Dane, Portuguese, Dutch, or American, these men wasted Africa, decimated her towns and villages, corrupted her politics, destroyed her economy, and hauled her people away wholesale to a distant land where those who survived were reduced to servility and "unconditional submission." It is not a question of whether the Anglo-Saxon was better or worse. What is important is that America is the place where white Christians and Blacks still confront each other in the continuing conflicts of culture and the differences of religious interests that have their roots in the response of the Anglo-Saxon establishment to the humanity of Black people. That response was initiated when, by whatever agency of the moment, the African peoples were herded into the holds of the stinking ships that reeked of blood and excrement and consigned to America. They were destined to be the Black African diaspora: the Mandingos, the Ibos, the Fulani, the Hauseas, the Makalolus, the Kaffirs, the Senegalese, the Iboni, Ibani, the Ashanti, the Wysyahs, the Bossutas—chained neck to neck, wrist to wrist, and ankle to ankle, and shipped off into a new kind of Babylonian captivity in Christian America. They left their gods, but not their God: Muslim, Christian, and heathen alike. Chained body to body between decks four feet high, if they survived the darkness, the filth, the horror, and the death of the "middle passage," they would arrive by and by in the land of the American Christians: the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, the Roman Catholics, the Quakers, the Lutherans, the Baptists, the Methodists, and, of course, the Anglicans once-removed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from African American Religious Studies by Gayraud Wilmore. Copyright © 1989 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface viiGeneral Introduction / Gayraud Wilmore xi
Part One Origins, Context, and Conceptualization
Introduction 1
1 The Development of Black Religion in America / C. Eric Lincoln 5
2 Black Church Studies and the Theological Curriculum / James H. Evans, Jr. 22
3 Assessment and New Departures for a Study of Black Religion in the United States of America / Charles H. Long 34
4 Folk Religion and Negro Congregations: The Fifth Religion / Joseph R. Washington, Jr. 50
5 The Religious Ethos of the Universal Negro Improvement Association / Randall K. Burkett 60
6 Black Spiritual Churches: Thaumaturgical Responses to Rascism and Social Stratification / Hans A. Baer 82
Part Two Biblical Studies
Introduction 101
7 Three Thousand Years of Biblical Interpretation with Reference to Black Peoples / Charles B. Copher 105
8 Black experience and the Bible / Robert A. Bennett 129
9 Biblical Historical Study as Liberation: Toward an Afro-Christian Hermeneutic / Vincent L. Wimbush 140
10 The Bible, Re-Contextualization and the Black Religious Experience / Cain H. Felder 155
Part Three Theological and Ethical Studies
Introduction 173
11 Black Theology as Liberation Theology / James H. Cone 177
12 Womanist Theology: Black Women's Experience as a Source for Doing Theology, with Special Reference to Christology / Jacquelyn Grant 208
13 African American Catholics and Black Theology: An Interpretation / M. Shawn Copeland, O.P. 228
14 Religio-Ethical Reflections Upon the Experiential Components of a Philosophy of Black Liberation / J. Deotis Roberts, Sr. 249
Part Four Historical Studies
Introduction 267
15 Black Religion / Maulana Karenga 271
16 The Rise of African Churches in America (1786-1822): Reexamining the Contexts / Will B. Gravely 301
17 Religion and Black Protest Thought in African American History / Manning Marable 318
18 The Muslim Mission in the Context of American Social History / C. Eric Lincoln 340
Part Five Mission and Ministry Studies
Introduction 357
19 Toward a Theology of Black Preaching / Henry H. Mitchell 361
20 The Woman as Preacher / Cheryl J. Sanders 372
21 Singing Praise to God in African American Worship Contexts / Melva W. Costen 392
22 The New Shiloh Saturday Church School / Sid Smith 405
23 Pastoral Counseling and the Black Perspective / Edward P. Wimberly 420
24 Confronting the System / William A. Jones, Jr. 429
Index 457