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This chapter locates this larger book project within the broader framework of Contextual Theology. It outlines the basic features and methodological points of departure in contextual theology, analyzing the seminal work of the Euro-American, Catholic theologian Stephen Bevans. It critiques Bevans’ typology driven, systematic approach to Contextual Theology, arguing that this method fails to appreciate the highly contested and politicized nature of the subject. The chapter concludes by highlighting the socio-political intent of black churches and Christianity across the world, demonstrating how this text seeks to problematize and articulate the dialectical nature of this growing phenomenon.

This chapter discusses the text, Tribal Talk. Topics covered include Black theology, the use of broken English in the narrative, hermeneutics, African-derived religions in the Americas, and African-American religious history.

This chapter challenges Public Theology to draw on the emphasis within Black Theology on the involvement of God in the affairs of this world, and specifically the notion that God reveals Godself as the God who is identifying primarily, though not exclusively, with the poor and the wronged. The second crucial emphasis of Black Theology is the confession of the lordship of Jesus Christ over all dimensions and sectors of life - from the most intimate and personal to the most public, global and cosmic. To be a transforming and liberating Public Theology the vision, aim and methodology need to be informed by central convictions about God’s bias in favor of the wronged and against oppression, and about the Lordship of Jesus Christ within a world pervaded by a spirit and structures of empire.

This chapter proposes a reconfigured Black Theology based on the contemporary context of the Black Church in the US in a contested post-racial, post-American world. In that context, Black churches are besieged by the “cultural hauntings” of race, in all of its shifting shapes and reinventions. This reference to shape-shifting is a form of critical signification on Black Church traditions. Historically, the Black Church has taken its metaphors, its parody and transformation of Western stories and ideas too literally and has mistaken these rhetorical devices for preordained things, essences. Shape-shifting is a form of postmodern self-reflexive critique of all signs which claim to be Absolute, including race, blackness, and theological metaphors. The chapter recommends, therefore, that the Black Church remain open to revisability of language and remember its own tradition of shape-shifting, signifying, reinterpreting in preaching, liturgy, and playing on words.

This chapter argues that the apologetics of black theology of liberation, evidenced by its wrestling with method, produced an obsession. This obsession resulted in the alienation of this alternative hermeneutics in black communities and created a rift between itself and its interlocutors. Preoccupation with method hampered black theology of liberation from dealing with burning issues. Since black theology of liberation in some instances failed to critically engage Western hegemonies and power, it was incapable of dealing with issues that could have rolled back the flight from the black self. The willingness by the oppressed to participate in their own oppression remains a painful pathology related to scandalous social ills such as Afrophobia. Violence against the black other is ill-informed and should rather be directed at the hegemonic powers of capitalism and neoliberalism. We need a theology that is willing to listen earnestly to its interlocutors.

This essay explores contemporary South African white (and especially Afrikaner) rhetoric on violent crime as an expression of what can be described as a quasi-soteriology of the laager. It presents this rhetoric on violent crime as a continuation of white rhetoric on the Day of the Vow and the Anglo-Boer War, which describes Afrikaners as being under threat and salvation being found by withdrawal into a segregated existence. The presentation of white Afrikaners as being specifically targeted by violent crime is presented as a deliberate rhetorical option which should be read within this soteriological logic. In response to this soteriological problem the challenge of a soteriology which finds salvation in the wholeness of the entirety of society and the end of racist structures is presented as a challenge to the White Church.

This chapter offers a brief sketch of the theological thought, or more specifically, the God-Talk language of Turner. The chapter then offers a rhetorical analysis of the text and argues that Turner engages in what some scholars call rhetorical theology. By maintaining that all theology is at its core a form of argument, rhetorical theology places emphasis on how a speaker or writer situates language in order to persuade its hearers to a certain position. In other words, when Turner spoke and wrote “God is a Negro,” he was not doing systematic theology; he was engaged in a public theology, which is a rhetorical enterprise that had as its aim a persuasive function within a specific context.

This chapter examines the Black Mural Movement in the context of religious imagery by focusing on the evolution of Joseph W. Evans Jr.'s art. In 1986 Evans illustrated the motto of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” with a painting of a Jesus with dark brown skin and tightly curled black hair, his arms outstretched around a smiling African American family. This image of a black Christ was Evans's vision of being black and Christian. In the 1970s Evans joined TUCC, where the pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., promoted Black Liberation Theology and recommended specific texts and sermons for the artist to study that transformed his conception of Christ. This chapter first considers black theology and pan-Africanism at TUCC before discussing the influence of the Black Arts Movement and the muralist William Walker on Chicago. It also assesses the impact, in terms of style and content, of the murals on Chicago's South Side on Evans's work and concludes with an overview of TUCC's stained glass program.

This book explores the visualization of religious imagery in public art for African Americans in Chicago between 1904 and the present. It examines a number of case studies of black churches whose pastors have consciously nurtured a strong visual culture within their congregation. It features examples of religious art associated with some of Chicago's most historically significant black churches and art in their neighborhoods. It considers how the arts interact with each other in the performance of black belief, explains how empathetic realism structures these interactions for a variety of publics, and situates public art within a larger history of mural histories. It also highlights the centrality of the visual in the formation of Black Liberation Theology and its role alongside gospel music and broadcasted sermons in the black public sphere. Finally, the book discusses various representations of black Christ and other black biblical figures, often imaged alongside black historical figures or portraits of everyday black people from the community.

This chapter analyses the theological tenets present in the historical black church tradition undergirding freedom movements. It discusses the role of the church, black religious intellectuals of the 1920s-1930s and certain theologies—the creative authority of God, the idolatry of segregation, the exodus, the person of Jesus, and redemptive love. The chapter reveals how these animated early civil rights actions and activities in Americus.

The final chapter documents the mainline churches and seminaries in the late sixties experiencing a series of crises in reponse to the great change of the decade. As inner city church membership declined, seminarians sought greater relevance and “authenticity” from their institutions and in their education. In 1968, this was capped off by death of Martin Luther King, and the Columbia Strike and the supportive response at neighboring Union Theological Seminary. As the nation turned its attention outward toward the war in Vietnam and inward toward increasingly volatile urban situtations, SIM was unable to attract needed financial support to continue its growing decentralized program of urban ministry projects, and it disbanded in late spring of 1968.

Latina theologian Michelle A. Gonzalez states that a merely Western theological anthropology will not suffice in a world that is multicultural and globalized. There are various anthropologies, as each generation of Christians reinterprets the meaning of our humanity in the sociocultural, historical, and political context of the day. Non-Western, contextualized anthropologies, rooted in the insights of liberation and constructive theology, bring to the fore the traditionally marginalized concepts of difference, body, and race. The idea of mestizaje within Latino/a theologies shows, for example, how hybridity is not merely typical for Latino/a culture but can be seen as a fundamental characteristic of human existence in general and of Christ as the full image of humanity in particular. Black theology highlights the problematic connection between the image of God and embodiment and thematizes how racism relates to the construction of what is and is not human. Theology must critically investigate how its constructions of humanity privilege certain traits of human existence over others, which hinders us in genuinely considering all human beings as created in the image of God.

In the years after the civil rights movement, evangelicals on a global stage argued over the very meaning of the gospel. This chapter traces this debate from the famous International Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 to a lesser-known conference named “Evangelizing Ethnic America” in 1985. While black and Latin American evangelicals argued that racism had to be confronted and social justice could not be separated from the gospel message, leading figures in the Church Growth Movement and Southern Baptist Convention took a pragmatic approach, seeking to use race for the purposes of conversion. While concern for social justice seemed to gain the ascendancy at Lausanne, the trajectory to Houston ’85 signaled that colorblind Christians in the United States could become multiethnic without becoming antiracist.

The pattern of holy substitutes persists into the twentieth century in two streams: the lynching of Black Southerners, and the emergence of the fundamentalist movement. Black preachers and theologians used the cross to expose the brutal injustice of the lynching tree, as James Cone argues. Fundamentalists identified penal substitution as one of the nonnegotiables of the Christian faith. These traditions reveal two sides of the cross this book has traced throughout Western Christian history: its function in legitimating the deaths of rejected peoples for the good of the social body, and its role as a boundary marker. Black bodies were murdered to preserve the purity of white society, and fundamentalists leveraged the cross in a culture war against modernism. In Black theology, however, lynching victims become holy figures who exposed the evil of extrajudicial execution, and who participated in Christ’s innocent death. The chapter closes with a reprise of the argument of the book, and a meditation on Anselm and the limitations of atonement theology.

This chapter introduces the book’s main arguments: that black southerners interpreted political events by discerning God’s purposes in emancipation and that they understood the entire late nineteenth century as an age of emancipation, notwithstanding political setbacks. Although most black Protestants agreed that God had intervened dramatically to free four million slaves, they disagreed in the decades that followed about what exactly God planned for their emancipated race. They placed their own experience within biblical narratives in order to predict a hopeful future. Black Protestants’ end times theology, or eschatology, defied categories of white Protestant theology and mattered in both black political decisions and black self understanding. The book brings state and local politics to the scholarship of black religion by focusing on North Carolina. The introduction argues that historians cannot understand black politics without understanding how black Protestants read different biblical stories and interpreted prophecies of the end times.