Prologue: A Personal Manifesto

Summary

My Commitment to Black Theology

This text is written as a plain, unambiguous, unequivocal contribution to the cause of Black Liberation theology, or as is my preferred term, simply Black theology. I believe that the insertion of the term “liberation” is there for emphasis, or as a rhetorical device, rather than posing any substantive purpose, for in many respects its usage is tautological. Black theology's “dominant reason” for being is to espouse the theme of liberation.

This book is conceived as a robust defence for a continuing commitment to Black theology that is prophetic, liberationist, angry, polemical and passionate. This book is written in that vein. It is not intended as an objective, calm and reasoned cry for Black theology as the substantive underscoring for Black liberation. It an angry polemic, pure and simple!

As I will outline at a later juncture, particularly in the next chapter, my approach to the “doing” of Black theology is built on the nexus of “church” and “academy,” and “Christian education” and “systematic theology.” In terms of the former, I have written this book in the same vein as all my longer published work, namely, as a means of trying to bring the church and academy into closer proximity. Since my days as a doctoral student in the 1990s, I have attempted to undertake Black theology as a means of formation and conscientization of ordinary Black people in order to build faithful communities of resistance from the grassroots.