Understanding Black Theology 2
The Books That Have Shaped Me
As Black History month 2024 comes to a close, I share the second half of my list of books (see first half here), off my shelves, that have shaped me significantly in understanding black theology, black church and black experience in the United States. Again, my intention with this list of books is not to give an exhaustive list, an authoritative list, or even a beginners’ list. I’m only recounting the books that had an impact on me, shaped me, helped me in understanding black theology. This is one white man’s journey through Black theology. Everyone will tell me of books I have left off and I welcome that in the comments. But this list is one man’s journey, a white man’s journey, to better understand black theology, black history, black experience. Maybe it can help other white persons who are on the same journey. You have to start somewhere. This is all it is. This is all it can be.
The first post was on the history of it all. The history of Black persons, in culture, through slavery, and the concomitant history of the way black theology has developed. This second post is on black experience. Experience is not the innate data of theology, but it is out of experience that we do theology. Out of our experience comes the questions we pose to the work of theology. Our experience of God is shaped within a culture, a history of experience. And so to truly understand black theology, we need to understand black experience.
For non-Black persons, we need to somehow be immersed and understand black experience, to understand black theology and to better understand ourselves and our own histories and experience. For black persons, reading about the black experience can be the means by which to better locate oneself, and be affirmed within one’s experiences, and understand how to navigate them. It’s so important to have one’s own experience placed within a history and affirmed as “Yes you went through that,” “yes, you’re not crazy for feeling that,” “yes, there is a way through that.” SO again experience is not the sole data out of which we know God, but it is that in which we dialogue and grow to see God and understand God as He is manifest there in that experience. This is one of the things we learn in the work of Contextual theology at Northern Seminary no matter what ethnicity in the 21st century you are a product of.
Most of these books are accounts of history as well. But the emphasis in these books, at least for me, is Black experience. So here goes. My second list of books that have impacted my understanding of Black theology.
ON THE NATURE OF BLACK EXPERIENCE/BLACK CHURCH IN CULTURE
1. Ta-Nehisi Coates We Were Eight Years in Power 2017. Coates writes as one living in a Black body in a white world. His book Between the World and Me (2015) was ground breaking. Nonetheless, if I had to choose between Eight Years and Between, I’d go with the former, because I’m trying to understand the Black person’s experience of living in a Donald Trump world. There’s much good historical work in here too for understanding the Black experience in America.
2. James Cone The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) Cone’s last book before he passed away. It is an illustration of the method of liberation theology. There are two essentials that Cone illustrates (that I use his text for in Northern’s class Theology of Church and Culture) in this text for engaging culture as Christians; 1. Go and be among the poor to see God at work. 2. And listen to the experience of the oppressed to discern God at work. His critique of Niebuhr in this book is important in understanding how we as Christians must engage culture for the gospel. In my opinion, Cone’s method can devolve into accommodation to culture’s antagonisms apart from a Neo-Anabaptist epistemology of the church in Christ. Nonetheless, this book is a clear and compelling description of Black liberation theology. It’s essential reading to understanding Black theology.
3. Keri Day Unfinished Business: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Struggle to Thrive in America (2012) This book focuses on the experience of black women in culture at large and then in the black church. It is academic, sociological, and complex in its examination of multiple experiences of black women. I was attracted to Day’s work because of her acute awareness and use of ideological formation ala Walter Benjamin and others, in dissecting how so-called “poor Black women” are exploited, oppressed and locked into cycles of poverty. Chapter 2 on ‘Faith-based Initiatives’ in particular helped me see that maybe a missing examination of the way power works could help navigate Black church engagement in the cultural sins and brokenness of our time, and Black women have a unique role to play in this.
4. W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk (1903) This classic is a work of poetic brilliance describing the meaning of being a Black person at the beginning of the last century. Living in the post slavery world, where every black person must now navigate two worlds, being a black person among one’s own, and living in a white world under the enduring oppression of another kind. This book helps those of us not black persons understand the experience of “double consciousness” which carries on to this day in America.
5. Michael Emerson and Christian Smith Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (2000) Yes this is a little dated, but yet still so apropos. Written by two white dude sociologists, who get white evangelicals. There is plenty of history of evangelicalism here in the opening chapters, but it is the ethnography (something we study and do in Contextual Theology Program) and the uncovering of assumptions and ways of seeing the world that help explain the tone-deafness and continued racialized behaviors (Ch 4-8) of evangelical Christians. Given where we Christians find ourselves at the present time in USA, it seems like https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Imagination-Theology-Origins-Race/dp/0300171366/ref=sr_1_1 rereading this book might be worth all our time again.
6. Willie James Jennings The Christian Imagination: Theology and The Origins of Race (2011) This is Willie James Jenning’s magnus opus. It is one the five most important works of theology in the 21st century so far. Key concepts are 1.) supersessionism, and the way it seeds euro colonialism and whiteness, 2.) displacement, and the way euro colonialist Christianity lost the role of place in mission, 3.) translation and the way it misfires via the previous two issues, and 4.) the idea of “joining with” a culture versus imposing upon a culture. WJJ vividly describes these ways of doing theology by telling the real stories of colonializing and enslavement via Euro Christianity. The book has become a foundational text for Northern Seminary’s Doctorate in Contextual Theology.
7. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) I don’t read fiction very often, but this all time classic is a must. Telling the story of Sethe, an escaped slave, having lost a husband and a child, she must now deal with the past. All of her trauma, abuse, and horror is somehow worked out in relation to ‘Beloved’, a ghost like figure representing her child who was tragically killed in her escape from being hauled back to slavery. This is more than an historic novel, it is a vivid retelling of the horrors carried within the black consciousness in America. It’s a starting point for one’s journey to understand black theology.
8. Albert J. Raboteau A Fire in the Bones (1995) A magnificent book that charts the religious experience of Black people in America, and the development of the Black church, as the Black people of America emerged from the “Middle passage,” to slavery, to Emancipation, through the Great Migration, to the Civil Rights movement. J. Kameron Carter worried that there was a modernist impulse in Rabtoteau’s work to apply a universalizing of religious experience over black church Christian experience. I learned from reading Raboteau about those dangers, thanks to Carter. But it was in Raboteau’s work I learned how two different contextual locations can interpret Exodus (and the Scriptures) differently. White Christianity interpreted the Exodus in terms of personal spiritual liberation from sin and seeing the United States as the chosen nation, while Black Christianity interpreted the Exodus as the liberation of God’s people from oppression and enslavement from the chains of this same nation. Context makes all the difference in how we see and interpret the text by the Holy Spirit.
9. Emilie M. Townes In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality As Social Witness (1995) There are many many impactful womanist theologians emerging in the nineties, but this book by Emilie Townes is special because it tells the history of the rise of African American spirituality from the years of slavery through to freedom, and how Black women saw their roles, and were confined to certain roles, but even so were central to the work of the Black church. Yes there is a lot of history here, but there’s a lot of delving deep into the experience of black women. She walks through three key novels, Toni Morrison’s The Beloved, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow to uncover the depths of the experience and wisdom of the black woman in coming of age and confidence amidst the many challenges.
10. Cornel West Race Matters (1994) Cornel West is a giant among intellectual thinkers today. His mastery of intellectual history is beyond parallel in academic world. And he is a devoted Christian and preacher as well, and so he breaks down Black experience and its cultural formations/assumptions within capitalism, nihilism, consumerism, colonialism, Black rage, Black love, Black-Jewish Relations, etc., like no one else. This book was my intro to Cornel several years ago. I recommend it.
11. Isabel Wilkerson Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent Wilkerson writes as part sociologist, part historian, part reporter, and part great story writer. She brings all these skills together seamlessly to write this mammoth best seller. Much like Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans, she is working to reveal the relationship between class/caste/economics to racism. Racism is an ideological construct that runs through a culture’s language, customs, ways of seeing etc. used to justify economic exploitation. She does this skillfully telling stories and events, locating them within a history of white euro capitalist racism. She includes references to the racist ideology of Nazism in 1930’s, 40’s Germany which makes the narrative more disturbing. I am going to go back and read this one again.