THE BLACK CHURCH AFTER KING: TOWARDS A LIBERATIONIST

ECCLESIOLOGY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN EVANGELICAL PERSPECITVE

JASON OLIVER EVANS

ES 629

LIFE AND THOUGHT OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

DR. BERNARD LAFAYETTE

CANDLER SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY

EMORY UNIVERSITY

DECEMBER 19, 2012

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Introduction: Questions

Who or what is the Black Church? What is its purpose and mission in the world? These

are weighty questions which scholars have debated since the dawning of scholarship on the

African American religious experience. Scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph R. Washington,

Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya have given historical and

sociological accounts of the Black Church’s inception in the Antebellum United States.1 Others

like Albert Raboteau, Curtis Evans, and Gayraud Wilmore also have given historical

interpretations of the religious experiences of African Americans since the time of the “invisible

institution.”2 Others within and outside of the walls of the Black Church have offered prophetic

critiques of the failure of the contemporary Black Church to speak truth to power structures

which continue to oppress those within its pews, especially African American women, sexual

minorities (LGBTIQ), and the poor. Others more trenchantly accuse the Black Church of being

complicit to such oppression rather than being a welcoming space of healing and a champion of

social transformation and liberation.3 In light of these failures, recently one scholar proclaimed,

“The Black Church, as we’ve known it or imagined it, is dead.”4

1 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro Church: Report on a Social Study made under the direction of Atlanta

University; together with proceedings of the eighth Conference for the study of Negro Problems, held at Atlanta

University, May 26th, 1903. With introduction by Alton B. Pollard III (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011); Joseph

R. Washington, Jr., Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (Lanham, MD: University Press

of America, 1984); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1969); C.

Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1990). 2 Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, updated edition

(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004); Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York, NY:

Oxford University Press, 2008); Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of

Religious History of African Americans, second edition, revised and enlarged (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983).

Wilmore has updated his reflections in a revised, enlarged, and expanded edition published in 1998. 3 For some trenchant examples of these criticisms, see Anthony B. Pinn, The Black Church in the Post-

Civil Rights Era (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002); see also Pinn, Understanding and Transforming the Black

Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009); Stephanie Y. Mitchem, Name It and Claim It?: Prosperity Preaching in

the Black Church (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2007); Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This!: The Ethics and

Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York, NY: New York University, 2009); Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality

and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999); Demetrius K. Williams, An

End to This Strife: The Politics of Gender in African American Churches (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress

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Most of these critics, sympathetic and otherwise, offer visions of what the Black Church

was, is, or ought to be. However, most of these, despite their helpful and undervalued critiques,

have failed to offer sustained, systematic theological accounts of the nature and mission of the

Black Church. This perhaps is partially due to the obvious theological diversity of the religious

institution. Its members claim diverse theological and denominational traditions within North

American Christianity, consisting of Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Pentecostal, and

independent/non-denominational traditions.5 Another reason is that most systematic theologians

in the Black Theology project have deliberately avoided doing lengthy works of systematic

theology in the traditional (read: white European and Euro-American) sense. Proponents of the

Black Theology project stresses “praxis-oriented” theologies which deal with the lived

experiences of African Americans as a historic socially oppressed people as they struggle for

Press, 2004); Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “If It Wasn’t for the Women…”: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist

Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001); Horace L. Griffin, Their Own Received

Them Not: African American Gays and Lesbians in Black Churches (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006). 4 Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., “The Black Church is Dead,” The Huffington Post, entry posted February 24, 2010,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eddie-glaude-jr-phd/the-black-church-is-dead_b_473815.html [accessed December

8, 2012]. For critical responses to Glaude’s post, see Byron Williams, “Eddie Glaude, Jr. Is Right: The Black

Church is Dead Indeed,” The Huffington Post, entry posted April 20, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/byron-

williams/eddie-glaude-is-right_b_544756.html [accessed December 8, 2012] ; Joel C. Gregory, “The Black Church:

Alive and Well,” The Huffington Post, entry posted May 5, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-c-gregory-

mdiv-phd/the-black-church-alive-an_b_565411.html [accessed December 8, 2012]; for a scholarly panel discussion

of Glaude’s “obituary” with Glaude’s response, see Anthea Butler, Jonathan L. Walton, Ronald B. Neal, William D.

Hart, Josef Sorett, Edward J. Blum, and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., “Updated with Response: The Black Church is Dead—

Long Live the Black Church,” Religion Dispatches, entry posted March 9, 2010,

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/2331/updated_with_response%3A_the_black_church_is_dea

d%E2%80%94long_live_the_black_church/ [accessed December 8, 2012]. 5 Generally, the term “Black Church” refers to those members of the seven largest historic black

independent Protestant denominations (National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., Progressive National Baptist

Convention, Inc., African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Christian

Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Church of God in Christ, Inc.). Of course, some African American Christians

belong to historic “mainline” Protestant denominations as well as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Other African American Christians belong to white conservative evangelical, holiness, and Pentecostal

denominations. Other African American Christians belong to a growing number of independent/non-denominational

congregations. Although some scholars would argue for the inclusion of black members of religious traditions

within the taxonomy of “the Black Church” (i.e. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, voodoo, Santeria, Muslims,

Baha’i, and so forth), for the purposes of this essay, I will limit the terms “Black Church,” “Negro church,” and

“black churches” interchangeably to refer to all members of Afro-Christianity. Admittedly, due to the complexity of

all religious phenomena, the boundaries of Afro-Christianity are more permeable.

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freedom. With the exception of James H. Cone’s God of the Oppressed and James H. Evans,

Jr.’s We Have Been Believers,6 formal systematic theologies have been the standard fare of

white, middle-class, heterosexual men within the ivory tower of the theological academy.

Perhaps such a call for an African American ecclesiology may be too lofty, unnecessary, or even

suspect7; nevertheless, as a student of systematic theology and a minister of the gospel, I long for

a doctrine of the Black Church which speaks to contemporary African American Christians.

It is only proper that I confess upfront that my theological commitments and social

location: I am an Afro-Baptist who, although sympathetic to the concerns of the black

liberationist tradition, is rooted in the more conservative black evangelical and

charismatic/Pentecostal streams within the Black Church. I am also an openly gay African

American man who struggles to find a place within black evangelicalism. This obviously creates

critical tension for me within the Black Church. I admit that I often take comfort in reading

formal presentations of Christian doctrines done by white male theologians. I also struggle to

understand to reconcile my evangelical faith commitments with black liberation. Many African

American Christians find it problematic to fully embrace the liberationist stream within the

African American Christian tradition. On the other hand, I welcome the prophetic challenges

raised by black and womanist theologians to the persisting sexism, heterosexism and

homophobia within the Black Church and the larger African American community. Many black

sexual minorities struggle to find a sense of human dignity within an institution which often

demonizes their existence for being same-gender loving and transgendered. However, despite

6 James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997); James H. Evans, Jr., We

Have Been Believers: An African-American Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992). 7 For one recent attempt, see Duane A. Belgrave, Sr., “Toward a Liberating African American

Ecclesiology: A Black and Womanist Theological Understanding of the Church” (Ph. D. diss., Emory University,

2001).

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the Black Church’s unrepentant sins towards its marginalized members, many remain within its

walls out of love for God and God’s people. Both proponents of conservative and liberationist

streams of black religious thought share the common socio-theological heritage of being the

descendants of enslaved Africans who, under unrelenting oppression, decided to “make Jesus

their choice.”8 The struggle for freedom as Africans in America and our faith in Jesus as Savior

of the world binds us together more than what separates us.

Nevertheless, the failure of constructive dialogue among black conservative and

progressive leaders within the Black Church hinders the possibility for a constructive

ecclesiology which affirms the theological commitments of both streams. I contend that the

Black Church will fail to accomplish its mission in the world if it lacks a theological identity and

vision. Can a constructive theology on the mission and nature of the Black Church be done

despite, or inclusive of, theological differences? Pursuing an answer to this fundamental

theological problem is the purpose of this essay. My starting point for this theological inquiry

lies in the reflections on the purpose and mission of the Black Church in the thought of the late

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the twentieth century, the Black Church arguably has had no greater defender and

critic than one who stood from within it in the person of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A

child of the Afro-Christian tradition and an ordained Baptist minister, King frequently criticized

the churches of his day for not fully living into their identity as a “voice of conscience” for

oppressed persons within and outside of its walls. King was convinced that the church of Jesus

Christ did not exist for itself, but as a prophetic witness for justice who challenges the status quo

and calls for radical social change. However, King, lamentably, never left behind a formal

8 J. Kameron Carter, “Race and the experience of death: theologically reappraising American

evangelicalism,” in Timothy Larsen and Daniel J. Treier, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology

(New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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ecclesiology for subsequent generations to engage. Fortunately, Lewis V. Baldwin, one of the

foremost scholars on the life and thought of King, recently published a theo-ethical reflection on

the late civil rights leader, pastor, and philosophical theologian’s thought on the church by

gleaning from King’s corpus and through engagement with other King scholars.9 Baldwin, a

trained religious historian, does not present an ecclesiology in the traditional systematic sense;

nevertheless Baldwin’s interpretation of King’s thought on the church deserves wider readership

within the academy and the churches.

Through critical engagement with Lewis Baldwin’s work on King’s ecclesiology,

alongside others’ reflections on King’s theology, and in dialogue with black, womanist and

evangelical theologies, this paper seeks to explore the possibility of a theological identity and

mission of the Black Church in the twenty-first century. This paper hopes to offer an African

American evangelical and liberationist ecclesiological sketch. In this paper, I will argue that the

Black Church is only true to itself if it attends to the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel

of Jesus Christ is the triune God’s decisive word of liberation for the whole creation revealed in

the life, ministry, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The Black Church is a

historical, contextual embodiment of the universal Church’s identity and mission to proclaim—in

word and deed—the good news of Jesus Christ in the world. Moreover, from an African

American evangelical perspective10, I will further demonstrate that careful listening to King’s

9 Lewis V. Baldwin, The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New

York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010). 10 Unfortunately, they are very few self-identified black evangelical voices who critically engage black and

womanist theology. For examples of such engagement, see Bruce L. Fields, Introducing Black Theology: Three

Crucial Questions for the Evangelical Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001); Thabiti M. Anyabwile,

The Decline of African American Theology: From Biblical Truth to Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove, IL:

InterVarsity Academic, 2007); Anthony Bradley, Liberating Black Theology: The Bible and Black Experience in

America (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010). For a brief, yet critical account of black evangelicalism’s relationship with

politics, see William C. Turner, Jr., “Black Evangelicalism: Theology, Politics, and Race,” The Journal of Religious

Thought, 43.2 (1986): 40-56.

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prophetic challenge to the black conservative evangelical and Pentecostal-charismatic churches

to politically and socially engage their contexts for justice does not mean that these

congregations need to stop preaching the message, “Jesus saves.” Rather, King’s insights on the

purpose of the Black Church will further expand and deepen black evangelical and Pentecostal

understandings of the church and salvation to include the social, political, individual, and

spiritual dimensions of created reality. In fact, announcing the good news of Jesus Christ

includes preaching liberation to the oppressed as well as justification by grace through faith

alone. The gospel compels the Church universal to engage in social and political action as well

as evangelism and mission. To preach otherwise means betraying the whole gospel.

To demonstrate these claims, I will first give a social-historical analysis of the institution

of the Black Church, specifically concentrating on its social and political engagements from the

antebellum period up to the Civil Rights Era. Although my historical overview will be brief, I

am concerned with the self-understanding of the Black Church as a social, political, and moral

agent in the world within these eras.11 Following, I will also give a brief overview of the Black

Theology project12. This movement, which began as a critical theological response to the Black

Power movement of the late 1960s, has been for forty years a critical dialogue among black

theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers of religion on the Afro-Christian experience. I

will conclude this section with some contemporary theological and ethical challenges which the

Black Church faces. Secondly, I will critically engage Lewis Baldwin’s The Voice of Conscience

while bringing Baldwin’s work into conversation with other theologians’ reflections on King’s

theological corpus and social witness. The purpose of this section will to draw out from

11 For the sake of brevity, I will not deal with the post-civil rights era substantively. I hope however, raise

some contemporary challenges which the Black Church faces for theological reflection in the final section of this

paper. 12 Here I’m using the term “Black Theology” as an all-inclusive term for the work of both black and

womanist theologians.

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Baldwin’s study some critical themes within King’s ecclesiology which are useful for this

reflection on black ecclesiology. Thirdly, in light of King’s thoughts on the purpose of the

Church, I will offer a critical reflective sketch on the nature and purpose of the Black Church

from a systematic theological and ethical perspective. In so doing, I hope to provide the

groundwork for an extensive constructive theological and ethical ecclesiology that would be

utilized for teaching purposes in African American Christian congregations as well as

seminaries, divinity schools, and universities.

The Black Church: History, Black/Womanist Theology and Praxis

History

The phenomenon of Afro-Christianity emerged out the cauldron of one of the greatest

tragedies of human history. Nearly five centuries ago, European slave traders shipped

Africans—captured, kidnapped, and sold—from various nations, kindred, and tribes along the

coast of West Africa over to the “New World.” Moreover, slave traders “baptized” many

enslaved Africans as Christians as they transmitted thousands of African bodies through the

Middle Passage. Despite the fact of being peoples with various complex belief systems (i.e.

Islam and traditional African religions), Europeans dismissed Africans’ beliefs as “heathenish”

in order to justify the enslavement of Africans and coercive proselytization to Christianity.

Nevertheless, despite the sordid means through which they heard about Jesus, Africans who were

enslaved in the antebellum United States reimagined Christianity as a source for their survival

and social transformation. Gayraud Wilmore observes,

What we may call “white Christianity” in Europe and North America has made a deep and

lasting impression upon blacks everywhere, including Africa. But blacks have used

Christianity not so much as it was delivered to them by racist white churches, but as its truth

was authenticated to them in the experience of suffering and struggle, to reinforce an

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enculturated religious orientation and to produce an indigenous faith that emphasized dignity,

freedom, and human welfare. 13

During the eighteenth century, white evangelical preachers, both Baptist and Methodist, began

traveling across the American colonies holding revivals on slave plantations. Often these

evangelical preachers demanded the repentance of slaveholders’ souls, but rarely challenged the

institution of chattel slavery. Nevertheless, the evangelical preachers’ message and religious

fervor attracted the enslaved Africans. “They accepted the spirited, evangelical interpretation of

the Baptist and Methodist preachers and imitated them, but they also went beyond that

understanding of the faith to fashion it according to their own social, recreational, and personal

spiritual needs.”14 Thus, blacks did not totally embrace all of the teachings of the white

evangelical preachers, particularly their teachings on the biblical admonition on the

subordination of slaves. In fact, some Africans patently rejected the Bible as a source of divine

revelation, preferring their lived experience of the Spirit over against the authority of any

external text to mediate the Divine.15 Despite the illiteracy of most of the enslaved, many

Africans embraced biblical stories and images of a God who was concerned about their condition

as well as the depictions of God who was liberator of both body and soul. Drawing from their

African sacred cosmology, Africans envisioned a God who is immanent with world, and

embraced them as children of God.16 Moreover, Africans envisioned a God would judge whites

for their oppression of the slaves. Standing within the tradition of the biblical prophets, many

slave preachers pronounced apocalyptic judgments upon whites for the institution of chattel

slavery in the United States.

13 Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 4. 14 Ibid, 8. 15 Ibid, 8-9. 16 For more on the so-called African sacred cosmos which Africans brought over to the Americas, see

Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1979), 3-75.

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Black Baptist churches were founded in the United States as early as the 1750s. The first

African Baptist churches were established in Virginia and Georgia. Some of the early founders

of these independent churches were slaves converted during the revivals of the 1750s. James

Melvin Washington observes,

[The early black Baptists] believed that spiritual bondage was a greater affliction than

material bondage, and that freedom from one might lead to freedom from the other. They

knew their churches were chattel arrangements. But they stubbornly trusted in the

promises of the bible that God is a liberator.17

Moreover, although most black Baptist churches met secretly (predominately made up of slaves),

many black Baptist congregations form alongside white Baptist congregations. By 1795, there

were eighty thousand black and white Baptists in the United States. Many blacks worshipped

within predominately white Baptist churches; other predominately black Baptist congregations

joined predominately white Baptist associations. However, white Baptists vehemently debated

over the issue of slavery. White Baptists struggled to between their affirmation of the liberty of

the conscience and social responsibility to enslaved black Christians. While the complexity of

the issue goes beyond this essay, it is safe to state that the white Baptists’ struggle over the issue

of abolitionism led to a division which led to the organization of the Northern and Southern

Baptist Conventions.18 While a formal black Baptist denomination would be established nearly a

century later (i.e. National Baptist Convention ca. 1895), many independent black Baptist

churches were established and flourished in the antebellum South and sprouted in the

Northeastern section of the United States.

17 James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power, paperback

edition with new preface by Quinton H. Dixie and foreword by Cornell West (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press,

2004), 8. 18 On the history of Baptists in the United States, especially conflicted views on slaver among white

Baptists pre-Civil War, see Bill J. Leonard, Baptist Ways: A History (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2003), 158-

226.

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The first formal black independent denomination was founded within the other

fiery branch of American evangelicalism, namely the Methodist movement. African Episcopal

Methodism materialized as the protest of devout black men and women against the injustice of

their white Christian brothers and sisters. In 1786 Richard Allen (1760-1831), a Methodist

preacher, was born to slaves in Philadelphia. After his birth, Allen, his three siblings, and his

parents were sold to a slaveholder near Dover, Delaware. Under the Methodist evangelist

Freeborn Garretson, Allen was converted to the faith at the age of 17. Because of Garretson’s

antislavery messages, Allen’s owner became convicted and subsequently allowed his slaves to

buy their own freedom, which Allen did and subsequently returned to Philadelphia. Later

Richard Allen became a licensed preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Allen became a

popular evangelist and preacher and led prayer meetings for Negroes in the early morning at St.

George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Later blacks were segregated to the gallery for Sunday

worship. In 1786 Allen, his colleague Absalom Jones (1746-1818), and several other black

worshippers walked out of St. George’s Church after Jones was physically removed from the

ground floor as they knelt praying.19 In 1787, these men founded the Free African Society, a

Methodist society which promoted the socio-economic welfare of free blacks and promoted

religious activities.20 In 1794 Allen founded a congregation in Philadelphia on the corner of

Sixth and Lombard Streets to provide space for black Methodists to worship without hindrance

or the mistreatment from their white brothers and sisters. This place called “Bethel” became the

historic “Mother” Church of the denomination. Richardson states that Allen and others received

19 George A. Singleton, The Romance of Methodism (New York, NY: Exposition, 1952) 16-17; cf. Harry V.

Richardson, Dark Salvation: The Story of Methodism as It Developed Among Blacks in America (Garden City:

Anchor Press/Doubleday 1976), 77-8: Richardson clarifies the incident: “[The trustees] did pull Jones, they started

to pull White, but the prayer ended, and they all left before they got to Allen. The three went out and, as Allen says,

‘we all went out of the church in a body, and they were so more plagued with us in the church.’” 20 Richardson, Dark Salvation, 70.

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harsh criticism from the white elders of the Methodist Episcopal Church; they opposed Allen and

others for founding predominantly black Methodist congregations. Nevertheless, Allen and

company did not return to the Methodist Episcopal Church. Other black Methodist congregations

in Baltimore joined in Allen’s protest.

As the years passed, Absalom Jones left Methodism and joined the Protestant Episcopal

Church and was ordained a priest in 1804, though he remained friends with Richard Allen. Allen

remained unapologetically Methodist in theology; however he knew that returning to the

Methodist Episcopal Church under segregationist conditions was not an option. On April 9,

1816 Richard Allen and fifteen black Methodist clergy gathered in Philadelphia to incorporate

churches from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Delaware as the African Methodist Episcopal

Church, Inc. Richard Allen, with the help of his friend Absalom Jones and fifteen others, was

consecrated the AME Church’s first bishop.21

Black slave preachers were known to preach fiery messages of God’s judgment over the

institution of slavery. Many white slave owners feared that the black slave preachers would

incite insurrection on slave plantations. Their fears came true when former slave and Methodist

preacher Denmark Vesey and Baptist slave preacher Nat Turner led slave insurrections in South

Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina in 1831. Although they were unsuccessful and were

executed, Turner and Vesey represented a prophetic stream within the Black Church which

fought for the liberation of the oppressed.

21In 1796, a group of black Methodist churches in New York City decided to separate from the Methodist

Episcopal Church for similar reasons like Allen’s movement. These churches then officially incorporated into a

separate denomination in 1821, later to be known as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ), adding

“Zion” to its name to distinguish itself from Richard Allen’s movement in Philadelphia. James Varick, a Methodist

minister, schoolteacher and shoemaker, became its first bishop. See Richardson, Dark Salvation, 117-47.

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Wilmore construes the protests of the black Methodists in Philadelphia and the slave

revolts initiated by fiery preachers such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner in Virginia in the

1830s sparked the emergence of emigrationism (Back-to-Africa) and Black Nationalism in the

late nineteenth century. Figures like Martin Delany, Henry M. Turner, Alexander Crummell,

Edward Blyden, and Harvey Garnet argued for the affirmation of an “African identity,” the

repudiation of the larger White culture, and galvanized American and Caribbean blacks for

missionary work in Africa. This missionary zeal was born out of a desire to fulfill the Great

Commission. Also, these figures believed that returning Africa will strengthen black self-esteem

and cultivate solidarity with their African brothers and sisters. Anthony Pinn observes,

For advocates of this position the United States was meant by God to be only a training

ground, not a permanent home. This perspective was commonly justified theologically by

arguing that God had allowed the enslavement of Africans in order to fit them with the

Christian faith and an understanding of democratic government. Once this information

was secured, they were to take back it back to Africa. The saw this as the fulfillment of

scripture—“and Ethiopia shall stretch for her hands unto God” (Ps 68:31)—that spoke to

Africa regaining God’s favor and thereby its former glory.22

All of these figures found their Christian faith to be the source of their efforts to bring about

social transformation on both hemispheres. They envisioned a church that bridged the gap

between the secular and the sacred. Against the charge of “otherworldliness,” black Christian

nationalists envisioned a gospel message of salvation that affected the multidimensionality

(spiritual, physical, social, and political) of black life in the here and now. Wilmore’s concluding

comments on this discussion in his chapter on “Black Religion and Black Nationalism” are

worthy of mentioning in their entirety:

We owe something inestimable to them for what they taught that the church means in

terms of self-respect, meaningful participation in the affairs of the world, and in terms of

an institutional base for black enterprise and culture. It was their hope to share these gifts

with all in obedience to the commandment to “go and make disciples of all

nations…baptizing…and teaching,” and especially with those to whom they were bound

22 Pinn, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era, 5.

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by a common ancestry and the experience of subjugation by the white people of Europe

and North America. In so doing, they demonstrated the power of their conviction that

God was using the black Christians of the United States in a special way to help fulfill the

promised glory of the Ethiopian people, of whom they considered themselves a

privileged remnant, singing their song in a strange land.23

After the death of the highly influential and controversial AME bishop Henry McNeal Turner in

1915, the radicalism of the Black Church in the United States began to decline. The Black-to-

Africa movement lost its most vocal and diligent advocate in the death of Turner. Although

Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) emerged in the early

twentieth century to take Turner’s place, Garvey failed to convert many followers since UNIA

had no formal ties to the Black Church.24 In the post-Reconstruction era, the voices of Booker T.

Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois emerged to represent two influential, yet opposing streams of

thought within the black intellectual tradition. The accommodationist Washington, while he

affirmed black social uplift, rejected Turner’s emigrationism and argued for non-political

engagement believing that a gradualist approach would change’s whites’ attitudes and policies

for blacks’ benefit. Du Bois, however, opposed accommodationism and affirmed black social

and political engagement with the larger White culture. Despite their differences, both

Washington and Du Bois believed the Black Church to be vital force for social change.

Despite Du Bois and Washington’s optimism, the Black Church’s social influence

dwindled as the Great Migration displaced thousands of southern African Americans as they

searched in the North for better economic opportunities for their families around the country

which were not offered in the post-Reconstruction South. By 1930, more than 1.5 million blacks

moved out of the South. “Whites, afraid of the potential economic and social ramifications of

23 Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 134. 24 Pinn, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era, 6-7.

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this mass movement, attempted to coerce black Americans into remaining in the South.”25 As

many blacks moved to the North, many who moved to larger urban areas faced serious economic

challenges. Many blacks were relegated to live in slums and ghettos and were forced to pay rents

higher than what they could afford. “Racial bias prevented them from achieving the economic

success they believed would be available in the “promise land,” and close confinement in ghettos

resulted in health problems.”26 With limited community resources, black juvenile delinquency

increased within the urban communities. Summarily, African Americans faced hardships on all

social, educational, economic, and political levels. Although many blacks stayed in the South,

many Baptist state conventions and Methodist conferences were dealt a huge blow to their

membership. “Some ministers tried to dissuade blacks from moving, but such arguments were of

little success in the face of mounting economic hardship and social disenfranchisement.”27

Moreover, while some migrants attempted to support their southern churches from a

distance, others sought congregations in their new homes. However, some of the northern black

congregations were unlike their southern counterparts. Some new tensions pertained to

differences in the liturgical style and perspective of the northern black churches. The northern

black churches tended to be assimilationist in their approach to worship and decorum in order to

accommodate the growing black bourgeoisie. These churches tended to appropriate a more

Eurocentric liturgical style. Pinn notes, “Having gained some measure of acceptance and

success, black churches and their leaders by and large did not want their progress hampered by a

new membership that reminded them and the larger white society of blacks during slavery, who

were stereotyped as ignorant, backward, and culturally insignificant.”28 Also, the movement of

25 Ibid, 7. 26 Ibid, 8. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid, 9.

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blacks out of the South shifted the power dynamic of the Black Church, which was primarily

based in the South. Black Methodist and Baptist denominational political drama ensued as both

groups debated over the emergence of new leadership and the redistribution of finances. Other

African Americans joined other “mainline” denominations; others joined new religious

movements, including the most significant religious movement to emerge in the early twentieth

century, Pentecostalism, gained many African American adherents.

In the early twentieth century the social agency of the Black Church took a dreadful

blow. As black denominations battled for structural power, most black churches failed to offer a

coherent, forceful moral response to the challenges African Americans faced in the pre-Civil

Rights era. With a few exceptions, namely Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. and his son Adam

Clayton Powell, Jr. of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, prominent Baptist ministers

(Powell Sr. and Powell Jr.) and Harlem’s first black congressman (Powell, Jr.), many black

churches redirected their visions of the gospel in a more conservative fashion.

The civil rights movement presented the black churches an opportunity to recast a vision

for social change as it once had in the nineteenth century. The movement placed many African

American Christians on the national and international scene has leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Fanie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and others led the charge

of the Black Church as the primary source of social change between 1955 and 1968.29 The

Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956, founded in response to the arrest of Rosa Parks for not

surrendering her seat on a public bus, launched the movement under the leadership of Dr. King.

King’s appropriation of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, along with his grounding

in the black faith tradition, personal idealism, and critical adoption of the social gospel and

29 Of course, Americans of all races, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds participated in the civil

rights movement. However, it is without question that the movement received its theological and ideological

foundation within the Black Church.

17

theological liberalism, provided the overarching theological vision of the civil rights movement.

King drew from all of these wells of wisdom to “move away from the Church’s complacency of

the early twentieth century and to reconnect with the social agenda that framed the work of the

first generation of independent black churches.”30 Many black churches did not participate in the

movement. However, the many black church leaders who did participate modeled King’s

leadership and thus led their congregants to participate by financially supporting the movement,

organizing meetings, boycotting businesses, and marching.

At the 1960s rolled around many young black people affiliated with the Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) became disillusioned with King’s nonviolent

resistance philosophy. Members of SNCC, once loyal to King and his philosophy, developed

mistrust for the clergy and argued for black radicalism devoid of theological foundations and

religious institutional affiliation. SNCC members became open to other more radical means of

social transformation which included, if necessary, the possibility of violent direct action. The

slogan Black Power captured an emerging social consciousness among many young black

activists. It meant that blacks no longer sought support from white liberals. “From the first

conference held in 1967, Black Power involved an embrace of self-determination, a critical read

of history, and a new vision of economic and political power.”31 By affirming Black Power,

many advocates sought to redirect the black community towards liberation apart from the

integrationist agenda of King’s movement. With this surging movement arising, many sought

the response from the black Christian community. Although King sympathized with members of

the Black Power movement, he abhorred their embrace of violence. King, albeit challenged by

his own growing pessimism in white America, stood by his nonviolent resistance principles. In

30 Pinn, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era, 13. 31 Ibid, 15.

18

the late 1960s, many black churches lost their progressive zeal for social change. The civil rights

movement, although it made many social and political strides, took a huge blow in the

assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. Subsequently,

another emerging movement arose from within the Black Church to interpret the Black Power

movement in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Black/Womanist Theology and Praxis: Prophetic Challenges to the Black Church

On July 31, 1966, a group of black clergypersons published a statement in response to the

Black Power movement. This group called the National Committee of Negro Churchmen

(NCNC) addressed the major concerns of the Black Power activists, which primarily was

ongoing cultural, social, economic, and political challenges blacks faced within the United

States. As black theologian Dwight Hopkins observes, “The article declared that race relations

inherently entail theological issues of which groups have and which groups lack power.

Specifically, whites in the USA had too much power and little conscience, while blacks had

abundance of conscience and no power.”32 Although not a full articulation of black theology, the

Black Power statement carried important rudiments of subsequent black theological reflection.

Three years later the group published a statement on the nature of black theology:

Black Theology is a theology of black liberation. It seeks to plumb the black condition in

light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, so that the black community can see that the gospel

is commensurate with the achievement of black humanity. Black Theology is a theology of

“blackness.” It is the affirmation of black humanity that emancipates black people from white

racism, thus providing authentic freedom for both white and black people. It affirms the

humanity of white people in that it says No to the encroachment of white oppression.

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! “He…hath sent me to preach

deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:18). Thus the black patriarchs and we ourselves know

this reality despite all attempts of the white church to obscure it and to utilize Christianity as

a means of enslaving blacks. The demand that Christ the Liberator imposes on all men [sic]

32 Dwight N. Hopkins, “General Introduction,” in Dwight N. Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio, eds., The

Cambridge Companion to Black Theology (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15.

19

requires all blacks to affirm their full dignity as persons and all whites to surrender their

presumptions of superiority and abuses of power.33

That same year the Black Theology project received its first coherent theological treatment when

James Hal Cone, an African Methodist minister and Ph. D. graduate of Garrett Seminary in

Evanston, Illinois, published his first book, Black Theology and Black Power. Again, Hopkins:

Using the lens of the African American experience, [Cone] argued that the core message of

the Bible paradigmatically expressed by Jesus the Anointed One was liberation of the

materially poor. Consequently, ecclesial formations, educational venues, and civic society

were called by God to focus on the liberation of the least in society: the broken-hearted, the

wounded, working people, the outcast, the marginalized, the oppressed, and those surviving

in structural poverty. Based on biblical theological criteria, Cone claimed, white churches

and most African American churches had failed their vocational assignments regarding their

faith and their witness.34

Moreover, Cone contended that the Black Power movement is the gospel of Jesus Christ insofar

as the gospel is the liberation of the oppressed and the “wretched of the earth.” For Cone,

liberation of the oppressed included the possibility of the oppressed engaging in violent direct

action, something vigorously opposed by Martin Luther King, Jr. Pinn writes, “Black Christians

struggling for the liberation of oppressed black America must determine their own means of

resistance, and violence remains a live option. From the perspective of black theology, the

proclaiming of this radical interpretation of the gospel was the theology’s role.”35 Cone’s book

became the seminal text which ignited subsequent theological reflections from Cone and his

colleagues J. Deotis Roberts, Gayraud Wilmore, Cone’s brother Cecil, Albert Cleage, Major

Jones, and a host of other theologians including Cone’s pupils who have become published

theologians in their own right. Although black theology has existed in the aural/oral and written

33 See “Black Theology” in Cone and Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History 1966-1979,

101. 34 Ibid, 14. 35 Pinn, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era, 23.

20

traditions of black Christians across the African Diaspora for nearly four centuries, it solidified

as an academic discipline with the publishing of Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power.

As stated above, proponents of black theology launched scathing attacks against both

white and black churches. Specifically, Cone criticized white churches, especially white

theologians, for not dealing with “America’s original sin” in their scholarship, their sermons, or

reflections in any form.36 Correspondingly, Cone criticized black churches for their obsession

over institutional survival rather than being agents for liberation of the oppressed. To abdicate

the Black Church’s historic status as an agent for liberation was to make a sinful concession with

white oppressors. “Either we mean what we say about liberation or we do not,” Cone says, “If

we mean it, the time has come for an inventory in terms of the authenticity of our faith as defined

by the historical commitment of the black denominational churches toward liberation.”37

Despite black theology’s (distorted) media publicity when then Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)

distanced himself from his former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. of Trinity United

Church of Christ of Chicago, Illinois before his election as the first African American President

of the United States, black theologians’ prophetic admonishments haven’t reached many African

American congregations since they were first uttered over forty years ago. The gap between

church and academy has kept discussions of black theology at a distance from the pews. Also,

the prevalent anti-intellectualism within contemporary African American congregations makes

critical engagement with black theology difficult. With a few notable exceptions, many black

36 James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, revised edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 42-49; see

also Cone’s sharp critique of Reinhold Niebuhr in James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll,

NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 30-64; James H. Cone, “Theology’s great sin: silence in the face of white supremacy,” in

Hopkins and Antonio, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology, 143-155. 37 James H. Cone, “Black Theology and the Black Church: Where Do We God From Here?” in Gayraud S.

Wilmore and James H. Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis

Books, 1979), 354.

21

congregations, who are generally conservative, hold a deep suspicion of black theologians and

biblical scholars trained at predominantly white “liberal” institutions.

As the second and third generations of black scholars rose in the 1980s and 1990s, the

voices of black women came to forefront of theological scholarship. Drawing from the work of

writer Alice Walker, self-identified womanist theologians began articulating their own

experience as black women of faith living within American society. The term “womanist”

derives from Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). As Delores

S. Williams, a womanist theologian, explains,

What then is a womanist? Her origins are in the black folk expression “You acting

womanish,” meaning, according to Walker, “wanting to know more and in greater depth

than is considered ‘good’ for one…outrageous, audacious, courageous and willful

behavior.” A womanist is also responsible, in charge, serious.” She can walk to Canada

and take others with her. She loves music, dance, the spirit, food and roundness, struggle,

and she loves herself. “Regardless.” Walker insists that a womanist is also “committed to

survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” She is no separatist, “except

for health.” A womanist is a black feminist or feminist of color. Or as Walker says,

“Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.”38

While standing in solidarity with their black brothers, womanist theologians critique the

longstanding racism of the larger white culture (including the blind spots within white feminist

religious and secular discourse) and the persisting sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia of the

highly patriarchal institutional Black Church. While black theology focuses on the theme of

liberation of the oppressed womanist theology emphasizes survival and community building and

maintenance. Moreover, womanist theologians draw from multiple sources, including biblical,

theological, ecclesiastical, social, anthropological, economic, and material from other religious

traditions. Three seminal works in womanist theology worthy of mention include Christian

ethicist Katie Geneva Cannon’s publication of her Black Womanist Ethics (1988), the first book

38 Delores S. Williams, “Black theology and womanist theology,” in Hopkins and Antonio, The Cambridge

Companion to Black Theology, 59.

22

published in womanist ethics. Following, Jacquelyn Grant, a graduate of Union Theological

Seminary and a student of James Cone, released her critical work, White Women’s Christ and

Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (1989), as a critique of

white feminist Christological perspectives, providing a constructive womanist Christology.

Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (1993)

presents a provocative rereading of the story of Hagar as a powerful critique of the “liberation”

theme within black theology. In the story of Hagar, an Egyptian slave sexually exploited by

Abraham and abused by Sarah, Williams finds an archetype of the struggle for African American

women’s survival in an oppressive system. Other womanist theologians like Kelly Brown

Douglas, Renee L. Hill, Emilie Townes, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, and JoAnne M. Terrell have

offered cogent reflections of black women’s experience of Divine reality within the context of

oppression in the subsequent decades. Douglas, following Hill’s critique of womanist theology’s

failure to deal with issues of sexuality, especially black lesbianism and homosexuality, launched

a thoughtful and provocative theological analysis of black sexuality in her work Sexuality and

the Black Church (1999). Douglas argues that the Black Church must break its silence on matters

of black sexuality in order to liberate black people from the White cultural hegemony which

continues to determine the value of black bodies. The Black Church must engage in a “sexual

discourse of resistance” to combat longstanding stereotypes of black female and male sexuality

and deconstruct its pervasive heterosexism and homophobia in order to liberate black gays and

lesbians. Instead of the classical “disembodied” interpretations of incarnation, Douglas urges

blacks to embrace an embodied view of the incarnation which grounds a liberating theology of

black sexuality.

23

Even womanist theology, although a grassroots liberation movement dedicated to uplift

of all persons, especially women of color, has fallen into the trap of an exclusive academic

enterprise alongside black theology. Many African American church women, like their black

brothers, have not heard of this movement. Many conservative black Christian women are

equally suspicious of the “progressive” agenda of womanist scholars. Black and womanist

theologians work diligently to educate future church leaders, both black men and women, to

effectively use their theological training in black and womanist theologies to reclaim the

liberation stream of the black faith tradition. The twenty-first century presents many social,

economic, and political challenges for the African American community which the Black Church

has yet to face head on in a prophetic way, including, among others, the growth of violence

within the African American urban communities, the grave disparities in public education, the

prison industrial complex, and the increasing rates of HIV/AIDS infections among African

American women and black gay and bisexual men.

A hindrance to the Black Church’s prophetic stance against status quo politics may be, as

some black theologians and scholars claim, comes from the increasingly popular message of the

prosperity gospel. The Word of Faith movement, known by detractors as “Name-It-and-Claim-

It” movement, is an independent, movement from within evangelical and charismatic

Christianity which espouses what some calls the “Faith message” or the “health and wealth”

gospel. In his study of the movement, former adherent and sociologist Milmon Harrison notes

three basic principles which form the core beliefs and practices of the movement: 1) the principle

of knowing who you are in Christ, 2) the practice of positive confession (and positive mental

attitude), and 3) a worldview that emphasizes material prosperity and physical health as the

24

divine right of every Christian.39 Summarily, by virtue of one’s “born again” status before God,

one has the divine right to access all of God’s spiritual and material promises made to her as won

by Christ on the cross attested in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, including physical healing,

salvation, and material gain. The believer must renew her mind by confession God’s word

regarding her identity as a beloved child of God and confess God’s promises. By positively

confessing God’s promise by mouth, the believer accesses divine power to call her confession

into material reality.

The promise of spiritual and material wealth has attracted many adherents within the

African American community. Many blacks will receive this message through religious

broadcast television; many prominent African American proponents of the Faith Message

include Creflo Dollar, Frederick K. C. Price, Leroy Thompson, and T. D. Jakes. Many black and

womanist liberationists, along with conservative evangelicals and Pentecostals, criticize the Faith

message and its proponents for its capitulation to the excessive materialism of American culture

and as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus Christ. However, the influence Faith message in one

form or another has gained some critical appropriation from black “mainline” church leaders. In

the AME Church, the Rev. Dr. Frank Reid III of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in

Baltimore, Maryland and the Rev. Drs. Floyd and M. Elaine Flake of Greater Allen (AME)

Cathedral of Queens, New York have developed church leadership models which stress the

socioeconomic empowerment of African Americans by developing housing, economic

development centers, and strategic initiatives within the community. They along with other

black megachurches pastors have adapted to the growing demands of financial security and

economic opportunities which African Americans desperately need. Arguably, T.D. Jakes, a

39 Milmon F. Harrison, Righteous Riches: The Word of Faith Movement in Contemporary African

American Religion (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8-12.

25

Pentecostal minister, author, and entrepreneur, takes a similar approach to his ministry as senior

pastor of the Potter’s House of Dallas, TX. “The need for jobs and economic opportunity leading

to financial stability and economic self-empowerment seems to be shaping the agenda of today’s

business-minded religious leaders in much the same way the structure of a Jim Crow society

shaped the political activity of ministers only a generation or so ago.”40 Nevertheless, such

church leadership models come under scrutiny from black liberationists who argue that these

black church leaders have abdicated their responsibility to challenge the socioeconomic and

political structures which place African Americans in a greater economic disadvantage in the

first place.

With such a lack of a constructive theological vision within the Black Church, many

voices compete for African American Christians’ attention in the post-civil rights era. However,

if we listen again closely to the reflections of black America’s greatest twentieth century leader

and the United States of America’s greatest prophet, the Black Church may regain its collective

purpose and reignite its prophetic imagination to do the work of the Kingdom.

The Voice of Conscience: A Kingian Ecclesiology

Roots of Kingian Ecclesiology

Lewis Baldwin’s The Voice of Conscience41 provides the first treatment of King’s

doctrine of the church. Although King never offered a formal ecclesiology, he nonetheless held a

strong doctrine of the church which he developed over time. Unquestionably, King’s doctrine of

the church’s purpose and mission was indelibly influenced by his family, ecclesial and social

background. Growing up in a family of Baptist ministers and in the Ebenezer tradition, where his

40 Ibid, 139. 41 For this section, unless otherwise noted, quotations from The Voice of Conscience will be cited using in-

text citations.

26

father Martin Luther King, Sr. and his maternal grandfather A. D. Williams served as pastors of

Ebenezer Baptist Church, provided fertile soil for the younger King’s understanding of the

church’s mission and purpose in the world. Both “Daddy” King and Williams served as civil

rights activists in the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP) while pastoring full-time at Ebenezer.

King’s mother Alberta Williams King and his maternal grandmother Jennie C. Parks

Williams substantively contributed to Ebenezer’s ecclesiastical life and the social development

of the black community. “Raised in a culture in which the church was a prime focus for

storytelling, King, Jr., became quite familiar with this history, and his sense of the inextricable

links between Ebenezer Baptist Church, the King family, and the quest for black freedom and

self-determination helps explain why [King], even as a boy, was uncomfortable with narrow and

self-centered images and definitions of the church” (Baldwin, 15). Joining the church at age five,

King, Jr. learned about every facet of black Baptist church life. King received his moral

formation and religious education while listening to his father’s sermons and participating in

Sunday school. However, King was introduced to a facet of church culture which he

experienced as a young child that would contribute to his formation as a critic of the Church.

Even at a young age King was deeply intellectually dissatisfied with the evangelical or

fundamentalist doctrines, faith, and practice of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. In his

autobiography, King admits to shocking his Sunday school class by denying the bodily

resurrection of Jesus while he was thirteen years of age. As he grew older, King became more

ambivalent about the church’s anti-intellectualism and, in his view, excessive spiritual

emotionalism. King confesses that the emotionalism of southern black Protestant churches and

the uneducated status of their ministers often confused and embarrassed him (Baldwin, 16).

27

Despite his embarrassments, King affirmed some of the emotive aspects of black Protestantism

which provided personalist and therapeutic qualities for black people. Therefore, King, Jr. never

left the church but struggled to affirm the best of its qualities while forming an unrelenting

critical mind challenging the church’s excesses.

King saw within the black church a place which provided a safe space for black people as

they struggle for a sense of dignity and personhood (“somebodiness”) in the midst of great

indignity, social inequality, and suffering. King’s father and grandfather’s involvement in civil

rights activism alongside their denominational commitments and interactions with black clergy

from other denominations impressed upon King that church was more than worship inside a

brick building adorned with stained-glass windows. The church was also a prophetic social

witness which spoke against social injustice. Despite their fundamentalist beliefs and fire-and-

brimstone preaching, King saw Daddy King and Williams as prophets who challenged the status

quo of racism. Specifically, Williams led Ebenezer in financially and socially supporting the

efforts of the NAACP as well as leading boycotts against a local Atlanta newspaper, The

Georgian, which was known to use disparaging language against African Americans. “Clearly,”

writes Baldwin, “Williams used the church as a power base and rallying point for such activities,

an approach that would also be used by King, Sr. and King, Jr.” (Baldwin, 21). Even within

King, Sr.’s biblical-theological conservatism the elder King founded a strong progressive

approach to social justice within the Scriptures. Alongside his father-in-law, “King, Sr., was

unalterably convinced that there were strong scriptural warrants for enacting progressive social

policies that encourage peaceful human relations, equality of opportunity, and a better sharing of

the earth’s goods, and that the church’s mandate is to make that known in word and deed”

(Baldwin, 23). Even in the midst of many black churches’ massive retreat into fundamentalist

28

escapism, King, Sr. challenged the black churches to embrace the Social Gospel without

compromising their fundamentalist beliefs. King, Sr. believed that the church was more than

affirming beliefs but was about social action.

Albert Williams King and Jennie C. Parks Williams also shaped King’s spiritual life and

the Ebenezer tradition. Williams, or Big Mamma Jennie as King and his siblings called her,

served alongside her husband as a church leader and as active Baptist churchwoman and a

celebrated speaker in Baptist circles. Williams also supported her husband in the fight for racial

justice. Alberta King provided spiritual wisdom and a strong moral foundation for King, Jr.

Mrs. King taught her children about the unjust system of racial segregation and instilled in them

their sense of “somebodiness” which provided the rudimentary personalism which King

cultivated during his years in seminary and graduate school.

If the Ebenezer tradition provided King with the moral and spiritual foundation to

understanding the work of the church, King’s formal higher education at Morehouse, Crozer, and

Boston University sharpened King’s critical mind for his future work in ministry and activism.

Still frustrated by the Black Church tradition’s ant-intellectualism, excessive spiritual

emotionalism, and unrelenting hyper-moralism, King found a haven for intellectual inquiry at

Morehouse College. At Morehouse, King had the opportunity to engage the powerful

intellectual minds of Baptist clergymen and scholars George D. Kelsey and Benjamin E. Mays.

Their work in the academy and in the Black Church for social activism deeply influenced King.

“Additionally, Mays and Kelsey presented a more enlightened perspective and tradition in the

southern black church, thus contributing to young King’s sense of the ambivalent side of that

institution” (Baldwin, 37). While King attended seminary in the North, he served as an associate

minister Calvary Baptist Church in Chester, Pennsylvania under the leadership of family friend

29

Josephus Pius Barbour. Barbour’s intellect, wit, wisdom, and commitment to social activism

inspired King even more to articulate and enact a progressive black ecclesiological vision. As

King pursued his doctorate in philosophical theology at Boston University, he served as an

assistant minister at Twelfth Baptist Church, pastored by another King family friend, William H.

Hester. At Twelfth Baptist Church King develop in his preaching as Hester supported the young

minister and his studies.

King’s further engagement with theological liberalism at Boston University opened new

vistas for critical engagement on the problem of race. At Boston, King engaged the philosophies

of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, personalist idealism, Protestant liberalism and the Social

Gospel teachings of Walter Rauschenbusch, Harold DeWolf, and others. While a committed

theological liberal, King critically appropriated the liberal tradition and brought it into

conversation with the black faith tradition. However, with the help of Reinhold Niebuhr’s

Christian realism, King rejected the excessive optimism within theological liberalism. With his

cultivated erudition, King walked between the intersections of the church and the academy.

King’s intellectual imagination allowed him to synthesize the best of both worlds. King’s

childhood, rooted in the Ebenezer tradition, his engagement with great thinkers within the

academy and church, proved helpful for King’s critical engagement with the churches during the

civil rights movement. The following will be an exposition of King’s view of the church as the

true ekklesia, followed by King’s thoughts on the mission of the Black Church of his day.

Ekklesia

At the heart of King’s doctrine of the church is the gospel of Jesus Christ. The church in

King’s view is a radical involved community of followers of Jesus dedicated to the preaching

and enactment of social transformation and the establishment of a just human community. For

30

King, the gospel was a social gospel. The social gospel was a message of freedom. Luther Ivory

explains,

The content of freedom was to be understood in programmatically concrete, political,

economic, social, psychological, and spiritual terms. King’s view of the gospel

complemented an important element of his understanding of humanity. In both, King

affirmed freedom as the most fundamental human requirement. Life, in its most profound

and cosmic dimensions, demanded the unencumbered exercise of freedom. Ultimately,

King grounded freedom in the actions of a radically involved God who works in and

through history to effect the restoration of love, justice, and peace in human community.

Essentially, King understood freedom, justice, and equality in terms of the biblical notion

of shalom.42

King’s sense of the church sprang from his formal engagement with the Social Gospel tradition

while attending Crozer Seminary. Although King was exposed to the Social Gospel tradition in

the form of his father and grandfather’s ministry, King’s reading of Walter Rauschenbusch’s

Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) provided a sustained treatment of the tradition. Baldwin

writes, “Rauschenbusch’s work, which advocated Christianizing society by applying the

principles of love and justice to the transformation of the state, economy, family, church, and

other institutions, gave King much of the theological basis for his understanding of the social

roles of the church” (Baldwin, 54). However, King rejected what he viewed as Rauschenbusch’s

tendency to conflate the Kingdom of God with any human institution or system. During his

Boston years, King critically appropriated the personalist ideas of Edgar S. Brightman and

Harold DeWolf and saw them as commensurate with the ideals of the Social Gospel. Personal

idealism’s core values included the affirmation of a personal deity of love and reason, the dignity

and worth of human persons, and communalism.

King also engaged the classical Christian thinkers from the patristic era as well as the

Reformation. Baldwin observes that King had a special affinity towards the early church. In his

42 Luther D. Ivory, Toward a Theology of Radical Involvement: The Theological Legacy of Martin Luther

King, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997), 85.

31

papers at Crozer and Boston, King appealed to the martyrdom of early Christians and their

subsequent struggles with theological controversies as paradigmatic for contemporary Christian

reflection and social engagement. “Perhaps more significant for King were the early Christian

martyrs, who refused to bow to the emperor or to go to war, and who suffered and died for their

faith” (Baldwin, 56). Drawing wisdom from Reformational doctrines of the church, King

affirmed the church as a spiritual institution (i.e. “invisible church”) and a fallible, human

institution (i.e. “visible church”). Also in his seminary papers, King affirmed the biblical

concepts and images of the church as a koinonia (“fellowship”) and ekklesia (“assembly”). King

esteemed the importance of fellowship as a central aspect of the church far above doctrine or

creedalism. Following his communalism, King affirmed the importance of a united community

under the Parenthood of God (Baldwin, 61).

An important aspect of King’s ecclesiology, in Baldwin’s view, is King’s stress of the

social dimensions of life. King sharply criticized the conservative churches’ preaching of

personal salvation which ignores the social conditions of those they seek to convert. Moreover,

King equally criticized the churches’ preoccupation with liturgical correctness or ritualism. King

believed the church should not be defined by its liturgical forms and practices but by its meeting

of ethical demands. “In other words, young King understood the church primarily in socio-

ethical terms, especially as he continued to reflect upon that unbroken tradition stemming from

the ancient Hebrew prophets up to the time of Jesus and the Apostolic Church” (Baldwin, 64).

Further, King criticized the universal church for its obsession with dogma, authority, and all

other non-essential matters for salvation. Because of his Social Gospel convictions, King

advocated a practical or applied Christianity. Furthermore, in King’s view, in history the church

often became a barrier towards human community. Therefore, church could not claim any sense

32

of moral rectitude when it engages in exclusionary practices. “King’s sharpest critique was

aimed at the church’s tendency to parade as a supporter and archdefender of the status quo”

(Baldwin, 67). In King’s mind, the church, by virtue of its calling, must serve as a prophetic

witness and “speak truth to power.”

In King’s vision, the church was a community which transcended all social, economic,

political barriers. King had little patience for class-oriented churches which privileged the

middle-class and wealthy over the poor. King affirmed the church as the whole people of God

(laos) and affirmed the Reformation principle of the priesthood of all believers, which includes

both clergy and laity in the ministry of the church. He held this view in tandem with the divine

appointment of pastoral authority in the church. Nevertheless, even with a strong authoritative

role as the pastoral office, King envisioned the church as a democratic institution (Baldwin, 70).

Drawing from the rich soil of the biblical tradition, King affirmed the church as a covenant

community. Also King affirmed the church as a liturgical community. A strong worship life is

vital for the community of faith; yet this worship is public, not a private affair. King criticized

any conflation of worship with entertainment. Moreover, worship is evangelical in the broadest

sense; it is a call to serve the living God who saves, liberates, and redeems. While the church

serves its members with spiritual resources; King warned against any “spiritualizing” of the

church which divorces it from social action. The church is called to social action and prophetic

witness as God’s co-laborers in gospel service. This included for King the church’s responsibility

as a “voice of conscience” in society. According to King, the church had the moral obligation to

engage in political activity and participation. King found that the churches’ separation of the

spiritual from the political realm to be unbiblical. In addition, King believed the church should

form “coalitions of conscience” with all people of goodwill. Baldwin writes, “Coalitions

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designed to promote understanding, goodwill, justice, peace, and community were very much in

line with [King’s] vision of an ecumenical church, and when intersecting people of various faiths

in his crusades, he was at times prone to ask: ‘How can we collectively put into practice what we

as the church are called to be?’”(Baldwin, 87). The images of “coalitions of conscience”

invoked for King the idea of “the beloved community”:

King understood the beloved community to be a thoroughgoing integrated community in

which persons are intentional about living in accordance with the meaning of agapé [sic]

love. It is not enough to just bring diverse groups of persons together in a community

(including an ecclesial community). The members and community must intend to be

together and to live in those ways that acknowledge and respect the humanity and dignity

of every person. What is more, persons must want to live in this type of community, and

be willing to work cooperatively to achieve, sustain, and enhance it as far as possible.43

Baldwin notes that King warned against the reduction of the church to merely a political

coalition, nevertheless the church should be open to forming strategies coalitions on the political

level to meet social justice ends (Baldwin, 88). One of the last images of the church we will

observe includes King’s vision of the church as a defender of the poor. After King’s witness of

the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots of 1965, he challenged all the churches to consider

poverty and economic exploitation as critical factors in the problem of race relations. King

rebuked the churches’ lust for wealth accumulation to the exclusion of liberating “the least of

these” among them. Finally, King envisioned to church to be a prophetic witness against human

destruction and warfare. Again, drawing on the witness of the primitive church, King protested

the Vietnam War and charged the churches to take stand against the utility of war. King saw

pacifism as essential to the identity of the true ekklesia. When many of the liberal church leaders

were silent, King took a controversial stand by calling the churches to task for its complicity in

warfare. “He never wavered in his view that the spiritual hunger, passion, and curiosity of the

43 Rufus Burrow, Jr., God and Human Dignity: The Personalism, Theology, and Ethics of Martin Luther

King, Jr. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 160.

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church had to be matched by an enduring commitment to peace” (Baldwin, 99). King’s

comments on the church, both its failures and its best days, were not in a vacuum. King reflected

from within a faith tradition which he saw the church’s more noble qualities enacted within a

smaller, nonetheless impacted context. King’s reflections on the witness of the Black Church

we now must consider.

A Balm in Gilead

In King’s mind, the Negro Church historically exemplified the images of the true

ekklesia. King understood that the Black Church at its best as a mission and movement. The

civil rights movement provided the context to see this truth in action. As a student of African

American religious history, King was well aware of the origins of Afro-Christianity in the United

States. “[King, Jr.] regard the separate and independent African church movement of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a critical stage in the beginnings of the black freedom

movement in the United States” (Baldwin, 102). Whether it was the black Methodist protest the

racial segregation of the churches or the slave churches of the South, King construed both as the

same liberationist impulse. Moreover, King acknowledged the political strategies of the slave

church’s use of Negro spirituals to advance their liberation. More notably, King commended the

older Negro Church for the appropriation the biblical Exodus event as the paradigmatic symbol

for liberation of the oppressed in the United States. The biblical symbol served the slaves as a

sign of protest against white slaveholders’ insistence of the divine providential mandate of the

“invisible institution.” To the antebellum Negro Church, King admonished his contemporaries

in the Black Church that they were indebted to their courage and sacrifice for freedom.

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King also highlighted, along with other prominent black scholars, that the antebellum

black churches preached a holistic view of salvation which included the social dimensions.

Baldwin writes,

King never embraced the contention that the institution was essentially uninvolved in its

people’s struggle for emancipation and empowerment. Instead, he apparently concluded

that from its origins, the Negro church, as he called it, understood salvation itself to be

personal as well as social, and that that [sic] body reinterpreted the gospel in terms of

social, political, and economic freedom while also extending a this-worldly call to

community action (Baldwin, 106-107).

The black churches of during the era of antebellum United States stood against the larger culture

and proclaimed judgment against the institution of slavery and preached freedom and hope for all

blacks. Their witness provided King with a model for prophetic social action during the civil

rights era. The Negro church of King’s day has no more exemplary model of the Social Gospel

tradition than their ancestors (Baldwin, 112). With this in mind, King saw a direct line of

continuity between the antebellum Negro church and the church of his day. Of course, King

brought something innovative to the Black Church in the form of his personal idealism,

theological liberalism, and his embrace of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent direct

action.

King believed that it was his mission to reignite the prophetic passion of the Black

Church in the 1960s. King challenged the Negro church, in order to be relevant again as a

freedom movement, to make significant changes to its practices (Baldwin, 123). However, King

faced various challenges from extremely conservative black churches and religious and secular-

minded black nationalists. Conservative black churches tended to preoccupy themselves with

otherworldliness, unbridled passion, and non-political engagement. Many black churches were

suspicious of King’s leadership and social engagement. Understandably, others were deeply

afraid of what involvement in the movement might cost them, namely their very lives. King also

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lamented the otherworldliness of many black churches which they used as an excuse for non-

social engagement. King found that the messages of personal salvation and focus “going to

heaven” too restrictive for a religion of justice and love. “While acknowledging that

‘otherworldly concerns have a deep and significant place in all religions worthy of the name,’

King declared that ‘religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social

conditions’” (Baldwin, 133). King found the complacency within black conservative churches

most troubling, although many black conservatives joined the civil rights movement while

affirming fundamentalist beliefs. Also like contemporary critiques of prosperity preaching, King

had little tolerance for money-chasing preachers. While sympathetic to some of the scathing

critiques of the Negro church coming from black nationalists, King called upon the members of

the Negro church to be self-critical and reform itself. For its survival and relevance in the

world, King charged the Negro church, the most influential institution within the black

community, to adjust and become flexible to the times so that it many perform its task as God’s

covenant partners in the struggle for liberation (Baldwin, 139).

Through this explication of Baldwin’s study of Kingian ecclesiology, I have highlighted

central themes of King’s doctrine of the church for critical contemporary reflection. It seems

after that from the reflections of King and black and womanist theologians that evangelical

theology plays a crucial factor lack of concern for social transformation in the Black Church.

However, I contend that such a lack of concern for social justice among the part of black

evangelical and Pentecostal churches may be in reaction to the dismissal of the deep fundamental

theological concerns by black and womanist scholars. Of course, many black and womanist

scholars would respond by agreeing with black evangelicals and Pentecostals because their

doctrines and ethics hinder the liberation of African American people. Also, King’s Social

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Gospel indeed tended to stress the importance of “deeds” over “creeds.” I believe the reticence

on the part of black evangelicals and Pentecostals to embrace black and womanist theologies of

liberation may include a deep desire to be faith to the gospel of Christ as they understand and a

commitment to biblical authority. By advancing an African American evangelical and

liberationist ecclesiological sketch, I hope to bring the insights of King and black and womanist

theologians in conversation with the confessional commitments of black evangelicalism and

Pentecostalism. Such an ecclesiology is a dialectical tension between orthodoxy (right belief)

and orthopraxis (right action). Pentecostal theology reminds us that sound theology must also

include orthopathos (right affections).

African American evangelicals and Pentecostals will do well to listen to King and other’s

scathing critiques against conservative evangelicalism and Holiness-Pentecostalism’s historic

tendencies to disengage the social and political arena in favor of personal redemption and private

moralism. Such commitments precluding social justice portray, in agreement with King, a “lop-

sided theology.” However, I believe that African American evangelicals and Pentecostals can

offer a doctrine of the church which takes seriously both King’s criticisms and the Black

Theology project’s criticisms into consideration for theological reflection and ethical action.

Christian orthodoxy and social political action should not be dichotomous in the Black Church or

in the Church catholic. Nevertheless, if an evangelical and liberationist ecclesiology is possible

for the African American Church, we must attend to the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ as

attested in the Scriptures and experienced in the black faith tradition.

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Toward an African American Evangelical and Liberationist Ecclesiology

Theological Methodology

How does one proceed on constructing an African American evangelical and liberationist

ecclesiology? African American evangelical theologians one must take this question seriously

for their task. For many black and womanist theologians and ethicists, black Christians should

look no further than their own cultural and social location for sources of theological reflection:

the Scriptures, black folk traditions, African American cultural history, African American music,

literature, sociology, philosophy, and other critical sources which shed light on the African

American experience.44 Rather than doing theology “from above” in the traditional (read

privileged, White Western male) sense, Black theologians challenge the Black Church to do

theology “from below,” meaning from the perspective of those who suffer from systematic

oppression and struggle for liberation. For doing an African American evangelical and

liberationist theology, I partially agree with black theologians and womanist theologians;

however, the task of the black evangelical theologian is to primarily attend to the Word of God

wherever God is spoken. This requires a dialectical engagement with the Scriptures in the

context of the community of faith. African American evangelical theology must be free to draw

wisdom and insight from thinkers from across ecumenical Christian tradition while taking

seriously the context from which it speaks. African American evangelical theologians must have

the courage to interpret the Word of God from within the African American experience. James

Cone offers wise and sobering words for all African American theologians:

44 Dwight Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for Constructive Black Theology (Maryknoll, NY:

Orbis Books, 1993); Linda E. Thomas, “The social sciences and rituals of resilience in African and African

American communities,” in Dwight N. Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Black

Theology (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 44-57; Williams, “Black theology and womanist

theology,” 63-70.

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The importance of Scripture as the witness to Jesus Christ does not mean that Black

Theology can therefore ignore the tradition and history of Western Christianity. It only

means that our study of that tradition must be done in the light of the Truth disclosed in

Scripture as interpreted by black people. Although we recognize the interrelationship of

Scripture and tradition, especially in the early centuries of the Church, yet the full

meaning of Scripture is not limited to the interpretation of it as given in that particular

tradition. Indeed Scripture and tradition often contradict each other. As the meaning of

Jesus Christ is not to be identified with the words of Scripture, so the meaning of

Scripture as the witness to the Word is not defined exclusively by Cyprian, Anselm, and

Thomas. As theologians, we must interpret the latter in the light of the former.45

Because the Word of God is free (Barth), we must attend to listening to this Word through

critical discernment. Although mindful of the danger of abstracting the living Word in

theological conceptualizations, we must be able through the Spirit’s power to hear God, even

when God chooses to speak in the words of one who comes from a privileged class.46 Further,

African American evangelical theology must also be mindful of the ethical implications of its

doctrinal commitments. Any black evangelical doctrine of the church must be mindful of the

church’s self-understanding as a moral agent. King warned against the church’s obsessive

commitments to doctrines to the exclusion of its social obligations as a moral custodian in

society. An African American evangelical and liberationist theology must ground ethical

commitments to justice and liberation. As Cone reminds us, “Formally, Christian theology asks,

‘Who is God?’ and ethics asks, ‘What must we do?’ Although separate questions theoretically,

in practice the answer to the theological question about God includes in it the answer to the

45 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 30. 46 Here I part ways with Cone in this sense he privileges the context of the oppressed as the definite site of

God’s revelation. As I would agree that the Incarnate One was born within an oppressive system (as a Palestinian

Jew under the Roman imperial rule), I am not as “dogmatically” committed to the notion that God will always reveal

God’s self in the context of the oppressed to the exclusion of those who hail from the class of the oppressor. Indeed,

because of my theological commitments to the full canonical witness, problems notwithstanding, I’m inclined to

believe God reveals Godself to a privileged Aramean patriarch (Abram) is the same God who revealed the Divine

will in the Exodus even.t

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ethical question about human behavior.”47 The Black Church’s actions in the world must be

informed by its self-understanding as a community of faith.

Sketching Out a Doctrine of the Black Church

An African American evangelical and liberationist ecclesiological sketch might begin

with the following four affirmations: 1) at the heart of the identity of the universal Church is the

God revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Church confesses its faith in Jesus, the

Anointed One sent by God into the world through the power of the Spirit to liberate the world

from the bondage of sin and decay. 2) The triune God of the gospel has gathered together in the

name of Jesus those who have heard the good news of Jesus’ liberation and salvation and have

responded in faith. These followers of Jesus, by God’s Spirit have joined together into the on one

accord as a community to partner with God in proclaiming God’s liberation of the captives.

Therefore, the Church is a cross-shaped community, committed to proclaim God’s saving power

in the world. 3) Moreover, the Black Church, as a historical, social and contextual embodiment

of the Church universal, expresses God’s redemptive and liberating presence in the world. 4)

The Black Church’s mission, in the power of the Spirit of the crucified and risen Lord, proclaims

liberation to the captives—through word and deed—and calls the world to repentance. With the

universal Church, the Black Church heralds the Kingdom of God. By its radical social

engagement with world, the Black Church declares God’s future of hope and salvation breaking

forth in the here and now. In following, I will briefly flesh out these claims.

Jesus Christ

At the heart of the church’s identity stands Jesus Christ. In another way, “Jesus is the

center of the church.”48 The church finds its raison d’être in the person of Jesus. African

47 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 180. 48 Evans, We Have Been Believers, 135.

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American Christians stand with their brothers and sisters in other Christian communions and

proclaim: “[We believe] believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord” (Apostle’s Creed).

Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of the Father.49 Jesus Christ was “conceived by the Holy Spirit

and born of the Virgin Mary.” Obviously, King would vigorously protest the dogma of the

virgin birth, he nonetheless would affirm with his black conservative brothers and sisters that

God sent Jesus into the world as a radical testament to God’s saving presence. King would also

affirm that God sent Jesus into the world as the definitive expression of God’s love and God’s

intention for human community.50 King confessed Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us. African

American Christians confess this biblical truth as confirmed in their experience of suffering and

striving for freedom. They have understood the truth that Jesus entered into human history as a

full human being who lived his life in the midst of those who suffered. Jesus is “who he was”—a

Palestinian Jew born into an oppressive system born under the rule of the Roman Empire.51

Moreover, Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human. His human and divine natures were joined

together into a mysterious union without division or confusion. Although the enslaved Africans

weren’t privy to the metaphysical arguments of the church fathers, they understood this reality in

their experience of the risen Savior within their midst. They understood that in Jesus they

encountered God. They didn’t question how or why God became a human (Anselm) for their

salvation and liberation, but they thanked God for sending Jesus to set them free! For African

American Christians, Jesus definitively reveals the person of the God and God’s redemptive

purposes for humankind.

49 Although I have attempted to avoid using personal pronouns referring to the triune God, I do, however,

use the traditional names in reference to the intra-trinitarian relations. I believe that contemporary feminist

theology’s arguments against the exclusive male-gendered language for God need to be reckoned with by

evangelicals in order to avoid any semblance of excluding women’s full humanity as bearers of the imago Dei.

However, I haven’t found any successful contemporary alternative language for the triune persons which does not

fall into theological abstraction or modalism. 50 Ivory, Toward a Theology of Radical Involvement, 81. 51 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 104-106.

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Jesus fulfilled the law of God revealed at Mt. Sinai centuries before his birth. This law

was summarized in the two greatest commandments: the love of God with one’s entire being

and the love of neighbor as ones’ own self (Mt. 22:38-40). God showed God’s solidarity with the

weak and helpless by sending the Word to dwell among them (Jn. 1:14). Jesus lived as a peasant

carpenter, yet to him belongs all riches and glory of this world. Jesus lived as a wandering

prophet who had no place to lay his head (Mt. 8:20), yet he is the One whom gives rest for the

weary and heavy-laden. The Son became a servant (Phil. 2:5-11), yet he is a liberating Messiah

who sets the captives free and comes to the aid of the poor.

Gospel

The gospel of Jesus—his life, ministry, death, and resurrection—provides the organizing

principle for the church’s existence. Christ’s word for the church and the world is good news.

For African Americans, the gospel message is salvific in the broadest, biblical sense. Like God

who delivered the people of Israel from the bondage of slavery, so too Jesus came to save

humanity from their sins as wells as from the sins of others. African American churches must

embrace liberation as a crucial concept which captures this truth of God’s salvation. More

forcefully, liberation is not an abstract concept, but a concrete reality of freedom which the

oppressed desperately, het hopefully, strive for in the world. Liberation refers to the human

struggle against the oppressive forces of this world. It is multidimensional in the sense that it

covers all levels of human existence. “Liberation is multidimensional in that it includes the

physical, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of human existence:

Physical liberation refers to the innate desire of all human beings to enjoy freedom of

movement and association and the rights of self-determination….Spiritual empowerment

is that dimension of liberation struggle in which African Americans come to understand

and reclaim their intrinsic worth as human beings…Cultural liberation refers to freedom

from negative self-images, symbols, and stereotypes.52

52 Ibid, 16-17.

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God’s redemption of the world comes to us in human history in a particular context. In Jesus

Christ, God makes God’s solidarity with the poor and oppressed of the earth. However, the

language of God’s partiality with the poor and the oppressed may be troublesome to some

African American evangelical ears since they affirm with Peter that “God shows no partiality”

(Acts 10:34). However, a crucial theological claim is made when black faith confesses that God

“choosing sides” with the poor and wretched of the earth. Since God is just, as all Christians

affirm yet liberationists push strongly, God chooses to come to the defense of the “widows and

orphans” who are victims of unjust systems. The Scriptures attest to God’s partiality in coming

to aid of the poor and defenseless in the First Testament and Jesus’ fellowship with the “sinners,”

the poor, the outcasts, and the tax collectors in the New Testament.

Moreover, it is significant to keep mind that African American evangelicalism’s stress on

the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross does not exclude concerns for social justice.

Although the wider North American evangelical community prefers the penal substitutionary

atonement theory, the Bible contains multiple metaphors to express the mystery of God’s saving

power. African American evangelicals and Pentecostals share with their liberationist brothers

and sisters the common affirmation that God liberates humanity from demonic powers, albeit in

different ways. However, one does not have to choose one theory over another. Christ’s saving

power is efficacious for justifying the sinner and liberating the oppressed from structural evils.53

53 Peter Schmiechen, Saving Power: Theories of Atonement and Forms of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI:

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005. In this study, Schmiechen finds that the biblical traditions provided

multifarious images to convey the saving power of God revealed in Jesus. In subsequent years, many Christian

thinkers developed theories from these images to explain God’s saving power in ways particular to their contextual

understandings. Schmiechen argues that Christians should not be confined to one theory over others since all

atonement theories have critical weaknesses. African American evangelicals, who desire to be biblically shaped

people, need not choose between social commitments demanded by the image of liberation over against evangelism

demanded by the image of penal substitution.

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The Church as a “cross-shaped” community affirms with King the church’s radical social

responsibility, following Jesus’ example, to engage the social forces in the world that would

deny people their full humanity. King had a profound theology of the cross. King understood

while the cross was not redemptive in of itself, it symbolized for King the depth which God took

to show God’s love for a world. Baldwin writes, “King found a workable model for the church in

Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross while refusing to bear in it all of its agonizing intensity. For King,

radical, costly discipleship was about the ultimate calling of the church to share fully in the

sacrificial life of Christ himself.”54 The Church of Jesus Christ, then, must take up its cross and

follow Jesus in the risky business of fighting for peace and justice through non-violent

resistance.

The Black Church: A Missional and Sacramental Community of Liberation

No talk about the universal Church can avoid particularization. Theologies of liberation

have reminded us that no Christian theology is truly “universal,” but all theologies are

contextual. An African American evangelical and liberationist doctrine of the church must first

recognize this truth. The Black Church, it all of its diversity, is a concrete, human institution.

An African American evangelical and liberationist ecclesiology must include the historical,

social, cultural, political, theological, and ethical dimensions of the black community of faith.

The Word of God revealed in Jesus concretizes the Black Church as a living reality by its

presence in the black community of faith. The mission of the Black Church is grounded in the

living presence of the liberating Word. In a more forceful way, the mission of the Black Church

is grounded in the mission of the triune God (missio Dei):

God’s own being is the Father, Son, and Spirit turning outward toward one another in the

divine life, and expressed in the Father’s sending the Son and Spirit into the world.

Through the Spirit, the Father sends the Son into the world. Through the same Spirit, the

54 Baldwin, The Voice of Conscience, 244.

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Son is driven into the wilderness, lifted upon a cross, and raised from the dead. In turn,

with his ascent, the Father and Son send the Spirit into the world to birth, indwell, and

empower the church. This same Spirit who unites the church to Christ sends the church

into the world to bear witness to Christ in word and deed until the end of the age.55

Through its engagement with the world—evangelism, social involvement, missions, outreach—

the Black Church participates in the multidimensional reality of God’s saving work.56 This work

is not a work of the Church but the work. It avoids compartmentalization. Instead of retreating

into an escapism or sectarianism, the Black Church becomes an extension of Christ’s concrete

yet mysterious presence. The Black Church can only become “a balm in Gilead” if only it fully

attends itself to the One who gives it life and meaning. This means that African American

churches must acquire the courage to stand against injustice wherever it is found—even within

its walls! For the Black Church must repent of its complacency in speaking on behalf of the

voiceless and the marginalized. Perhaps the greatest controversy within the worldwide Christian

churches is the place of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, intersexed, and queer (or

questioning) people among them. Despite their disagreements over homosexuality, the Black

Church cannot stand back and allow the rate of suicides among black LGBTIQ youth to rise any

further.

As a sacramental community of Christ’s living presence, the Black Church must envision

itself as a place of welcome so that persons of all sexual and gender identities and expressions

can join, learn, struggle together as a community to discern the meaning of the Christian life.

Therefore, an African American evangelical and liberationist ecclesiology must develop an

understanding of the unity and the diversity of the Church which accounts for these diverse

embodied experiences with in it. As Jesus sought fellowship with the social and religious

55 Brad Harper and Paul Louis Metzger, Exploring Ecclesiology: An Evangelical and Ecumenical

Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 237. 56 Harper and Metzger, Exploring Ecclesiology, 238.

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outcasts of his day, the Black Church must seek fellowship with its society’s ‘wretches’ to call

from the “highways and byways” of our communities to share the immeasurable love of Jesus

Christ.

Kingdom

The Church is an eschatological community.57 It is a community which anticipates God’s

future of human solidarity and flourishing to break forth in the present. The content of Jesus’

message was indisputably the Kingdom of God. In the history of Christian thought, theologians

have produced various, at times, contradictory interpretations of this Jesus’ central message. In

North America, evangelicalism tends to stress a dualistic, “otherworldly” anticipation of the

future where God destroys the present world, ridding it of all evil and sinners and creating a

“new heaven and new earth” where Christ will come again to commence his millennial reign.

Many African American Christians in some form affirm this eschatological view. Others,

specifically in the prosperity gospel movement, believe that it is the task of the Christian to

acquire wealth to build God’s Kingdom on earth before Christ returns. Against these views of

the Kingdom, Dr. King affirmed a radically non-dualistic view of God’s future:

A careful analysis of King’s life and thought reveals a remarkable capacity to image and

sustain hope in the possibilities of a future that was qualitatively different from the

present. King’s understanding of history as fundamentally conflictual allowed him to be

open to the transient nature of reality…At the very heart of the universe, he believed, the

superpersonal forces of good and evil were perpetually locked in a perennial struggle for

cosmic control. And yet, a strong faith in an able, loving God and the justice of the

universe sustained King’s belief that ultimately the forces of good and justice would

emerge triumphant over the forces of evil and injustice.58

King construed the Kingdom of God as God’s vision of a new human community anchored by

peace, justice, and love. This vision gave King the moral resilience to fight for social justice in

the world. King believed that this vision of God’s future of justice and a new humanity placed

57 Harper and Metzger, Exploring Ecclesiology, 47-77. 58 Ivory, Toward a Theology of Radical Involvement, 95.

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ethical demands on the Church. However, King’s vision of the God’s future of human solidarity

was tempered by a critical realist approach. King was not naïve about the present realities of

racial injustice, warfare, and economic cruelties which many faced. However, King resisted

pessimism and clung to hope for a just world.

The Black Church as an eschatological community points to and participates in God’s

future of hope. The Black Church bears witness to God’s Kingdom of justice, peace, and love. It

also participates through social engagement with the powers and principalities of this age that

evil, death, and ecological destruction does not have the last word. Although it lies in tension of

the “already” and “not yet” of the present reality, King admonishes all of us (especially black

evangelicals!) that the Kingdom of God will not come without our participation. Of course, an

African American evangelical and liberationist ecclesiology will be grounded in the Word of

God as attested in the Scriptures. However, King’s vision of God’s future, despite evangelical

suspicions of the Social Gospel tradition, is more commensurate with evangelical faith and hope

then the escapism perverted captured in the highly marketed Left Behind series. The Black

Church, in their preaching of “going up yonder to be with [the] Lord” must in the meantime do

the work of the One who came preaching the Kingdom of God. This work includes active

participation in the affairs of this world and social protest against structures which deny liberty to

all.

Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to search for a coherent theological identity and mission of

the Black Church. In this exploration I found that within the history of Afro-Christianity lies an

impulse for salvation and liberation. This impulse emerged as enslaved Africans baptized in the

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name of Jesus contended—in word and deed—for the gospel of Jesus which liberates both body

and soul. From the time of slavery, African American Christian struggled to make sense of their

faith in light of their experience as oppressed people. Although the institution did not always

lived out the confession of their faith, God sent prophets in the form of Henry Turner, Alexander

Crummell, and David Walker to remind the Church of its sacred obligation to proclaim the

gospel to the entire world. Like the faithful men and women before them, they reminded the

Church of its mission as a prophetic witness to the freedom which Christ the Lord brings to

suffering people.

Martin Luther King, Jr. stood within the black faith tradition. He understood the Black

Church’s sacred obligation to participate in God’s plan of human liberation and flourishing for

all God’s children. The Black Theology picked up when King left us too soon. However, their

work and King’s words challenge African American Christians, especially black evangelicals

and Pentecostals, to realize that there is more to salvation and church life they singing songs of

Zion and longing for the great heavenly city. King, Cone, and many others remind the Black

Church of its mission as prophetic agitators for justice’s sake. In the Black Church’s best light,

King saw a concrete example of what the Church universal ought to be—community of radical

change. From King’s insights, I have attempted to sketch out an African American evangelical-

liberationist ecclesiology which attends to the liberating Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Hopefully, the Black Church will hear again from this life-giving Word the reason for its

being—to be salt and light to the world and to bind up the broken-hearted.

49

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