Black Theology

Extract

It was my original intention to write this article about black theology in South Africa, where I first encountered the movement. But two things have led me to form the opinion that black theology is of crucial importance to Christianity all over the world, and not just in South Africa, or in the United States, where the idea was born. One has been my reading of two books by the black American theologian James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, and A Black Theology of Liberation ; and the other has been my introduction, very recent and superficial though it is, to the race question, and kindred political questions, in Great Britain. So I will, after all, devote this article to the subject of black theology as such, and chiefly in the form of a review of Cone’s two books. But I will lead into this subject by way of black theology in South Africa.

In writing this article I incur the risk of bringing down on my head the hostility and scorn of black theologians, or quite simply of blacks. As a white man I have no business to poke my long Caucasian nose in. Cone is quite scathing in BTL (p. 194) on two white liberals who presumed to write on the black power movement; and on the same page he writes: ‘To whites who want to know what they can do (a favourite question of oppressors) black theology says, “Keep your damned mouth closed, and let us black people get our thing together.” ‘ Still, just as in the dominant white ethos of today, or at least of a generation ago, it was possible for a black man to be a good nigger, and sometimes even earn the supreme accolade of being told that he was a true white man, in spite of his skin (You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din), so in the black ethos of the dominated which we are going to be looking at, it is possible for a white man to be a good honky.