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Black Theology

Black or Negro Theology is a theology based on the historical experience of slavery and inhumanity of racial segregation. It concerns above all situation of the oppressed in the United States of America, the Caribbean, and South Africa. It reflects discussions of white missionaries on the rightfulness of the slavery status at the colonization era,⁴⁹ and of the segregation in Christian temples during services.

White Quakers in the middle of the eighteenth century were the first to advert to the amorality of slavery and fought for its abolition. “Black churches” began to originate in the seventies, as an answer to the justifiably sensed intolerance in the “mixed” Christian churches. In these Black churches gradually developed also Black Theology, influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, by the work of a black historian Joseph Washington Black religion⁵⁰ and by the political movement called Black Government.⁵¹

A Detroit preacher Albert Cleage, in his book from 1969 Black Messiah, appealed to black people for liberation from white theological oppression. This way, he united black Christians determined to defend the right for their own identity. He summarized the particularities of the black religion in the North American environment and stressed the need for integration and assimilation of black theological concepts with the main Protestant stream.

The most important personality of Black Theology is probably James H. Cone, the author of the book A Black Theology of Liberation (1970). At first, he was blamed for using Barth’s (white theological) categories. In his latter works, he authoritatively responded to this with the “black experience” as the main source of his doctrine .⁵²

Later on, the movement elaborated several fundamental documents, out of which the most important became the Black Manifesto. It emphasized liberation as the leitmotif of the Black Theology. It shall be an acknowledgement of the dignity of black mankind, which liberates the black from racial oppression, thus opening the way to the real freedom of both white as well as black.

Black Theology was influenced, mostly since 1977, by the interest in Latin American Liberation Movement and by “non-Western theologies” in Asia. Black Theology sets its own ultimate goal – to secure a space for the experience of black people in the theological reflexion. Since 1975, it has strived for the integration of different perspectives of liberation (classes, races, sexism).

Martin Luther King, a black Baptist minister, entered the world history with his fight within the Civil Rights Movement and against discrimination of a colored population in the US. In 1964, he also became a Nobel Prize winner for peace. In his protest movement, he drew inspiration from M. K. Gandhi and his non-violent resistance.

Under the influence of Latin-American Liberation Theology, originates African Liberation Theology represented by a Cameroonian Catholic theologian Jean-Marc Ela and a Cameroonian Jesuit Engelbert Mveng. Ela pushes forward the issue of the Christianity in the society of poverty and oppression, Mveng speaks about the anthropological human poverty caused by getting rid of one's own identity by means of black-slave trade and colonization.

A specific status is the one of the South African Black Theology influenced by the Apartheid policy. It originated at the beginning of the seventies and expressed itself in a series of events at Christian university centers of South Africa. It was influenced by the American Black Theology but eventually chose an anthropological and ethnographic approach.

Desmond Tutu, a black Anglican priest, became a Nobel Prize winner for peace in 1984. He has been tirelessly elucidating mission and involvement of the Black Theology expressing consolidation of the black identity, disapprobation of the apartheid, and liberation.

Some feminist theologians also try to prove that the Christian theology legitimated the dualistic understanding of supremacy in relations between God and humankind, Christ and the church, adults and children, priests and lay people, rich and poor nations, white and colored race, and, at last, between a human and the nature.⁵⁴

There exist various opinions on position of women of the Third World, black women, or women of different cultures and classes on different continents within the frame of the Christian feminist theology. These opinions include not only feminist problems, but also issues of law, justice, peace, economy, or ecology. In the contemporary feminist theology, there are heated discussions on the raised question whether men and women represent one, or two human natures.