The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness

3. Black Theologians on the Mission of the Black Church

75 3 BLACK THEOLOGIANS ON THE MISSION OF THE BLACK CHURCH Black theology emerged as the last of four critical moments in the black church’s apprehension of a holistically salvific faith, one providing principled Christian resistance to racism. It represented a new and self-conscious form of God-talk, a sophisticated apologia for a faith formed in slavery and in defense of a black liberationist trajectory that continues to bear witness against the sins of a nation that is at once putatively Christian and profoundly racist. Black theology is best understood in relationship to the liberationist God-talk shaped in the brush arbors of the invisible institution; lived out in the varied aggregations of black Christians that constitute the social reality of the black church, resident in both black and white denominations; and activated by various liberationist efforts that culminate with the civil rights movement. That part of nascent black theology’s very raison d’être was to offer a reasoned exposition of the true gospel of liberation and consequently a defense of the liberationist faith lived out in black churches is a fact often overlooked in the debate about the problematic relationship between black theology and the black church.1 It is a very significant fact nonetheless. First, it provides the historical background for carefully examining the nuances of abiding theological tensions between black theologians and black pastors, as well as within the divided mind of the black church itself regarding the church’s essential mission. We shall examine those tensions as they emerge in the methodological approaches of selective first- and second-generation 76 T H E D I V I D E D M I N D O F T H E B L AC K C H U RC H black theologians in this chapter and among varying pastoral perspectives to be discussed in the next. Second, this historical acknowledgment of the abiding kinship and incorrigible connection between black theology and the black church provides the necessary basis for a much-needed discussion between black theologians and black pastors. Third, it is quite significant that an academic theology actually emerged in defense of the liberating legacy of the black church when one simply observes that the black church, then and now, represents the most misunderstood and caricatured religious institution both in American popular culture and in the world of intellectual discourse.2 Not unlike the people who constitute its membership, the black church is quite often the object of a culture that gazes on it with what Du Bois called “amused contempt and pity.”3 It is too seldom taken seriously by academics and too often caricatured and stereotyped within popular culture. Yet, aroused by Joseph Washington’s tough questions regarding the Christian identity of the black church, inspired by the Christian activism of the civil rights movement, and challenged by the militancy and moral claims of the black power movement, black theologians defended the black church’s liberationist heritage and lifted it up as both antecedent and natural ally to black power. Yet, even as black theologians have defended the black church, they have also been its most consistent and principled critics. At the heart of their concern has been the issue of the depth of the black church’s commitment to a liberationist understanding of the gospel and the extent to which that understanding is (under)represented in the organizational structure and agenda of its institutional life. It is to this concern and its influence on the development of black theology that we now turn our attention. The sense that the institutional life of the black church reflects a weak and wavering commitment to the project of liberation and to the true gospel as a gospel of liberation manifests itself in key texts written by black theologians. I argue that it is indicative of differences in theological emphases between the pietistic and liberationist dimensions of black salvific understanding. In this way, the debates among black theologians themselves and between black theologians and black Black Theologians on the Mission of the Black Church 77 pastors have often been manifestations of themes dialectically related, shifting at different historical moments, in the saga of black faith. Moreover, the emergence of black theology, with its strident critique of the black church, represents a self-conscious, theological development within a larger and much-longer discussion within the black community and among black intellectuals in particular, of...