An Obituary For The Wrong Subject A Response To Alistair Kees The Rise And Demise Of Black Theology

Pneuma 30 (2008) 299-307

An Obituary for the Wrong Subject: A Response to Alistair Kee’s The Rise and Demise

of Black T eology

R. David Muir

Evangelical Alliance, Whiteﬁ eld House, 186 Kennington Park Road,

London, SE11 4BT, UK

It is fortuitous that interpretive issues in the so-called ‘rise and demise’ of Black Theology are under discussion as we in the United Kingdom and colleagues in the United States, respectively, commemorate the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act.2 This is not only because Black Theology (in its early years at least) attempted to speak to, and into, the meaning, defining moments, and legacy of slavery, but also because it provided a language to rescue Black Christian radicalism from hopeless- ness and proto- nihilism in the face of historic racism and socio-political disenfranchisement. What I intend to do below is to briefly examine the content and challenges of Kee’s contentious claims concerning the failure of Black Theology and its repeated ‘mantras’, as well as to make a few remarks about some of the implications of politicisation and the ‘hermeneutical circle’ of Black Theology.

By way of autobiography, and what Moltmann refers to as the ‘existential theology’ that arises out of one’s own ‘theological existence’ and ‘personal experience’,3 let me say that I ﬁrst encountered James Cone’s Black T eology

Alistair Kee, The Rise and Demise of Black T eology (Burlington, Vt., and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). Further references to this book will be made parenthetically in the text as RDBT followed by page number.

This Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1807 abolishing the slave trade in British colonies; the abolition of slavery itself had to wait until 1833. The slave masters were paid £20,000,000 by the British Government.

Jürgen Moltmann, Experiences in T eology: Ways and Forms of Christian T eology (London: SCM Press, 2000), 3-4.

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and Black Power whilst writing my undergraduate thesis on Freiedrich Nietzsche. My traditional Congregational and Pentecostal background pre- pared me for neither, but I remember the profound impact that Nietzsche’s parable of the ‘Madman’ announcing the cultural-historic death of God and its metaphysical and moral implications,4 and Cone’s claim that Black Power ‘even in its most radical expression, is not the antithesis of Christianity. . . . It is rather, Christ central message to twentieth century America’,5 had on me. I felt then (as I do now), that both claims, powerful and signiﬁ cant as they are in language and symbolism, were exaggerated. T ey contained elements of truth, as well as serious cognitive and psychological challenges for theology. Kee, of course, makes it clear in his book that he has a cultural and theological prob- lem with this ‘extraordinary claim’ of James Cone.

Epistemologically and methodologically, Alistair Kee’s thesis about the ‘demise’ of Black T eology sound a little premature, even ‘exaggerated’ in the Twainian sense;6 and this is whether we understand ‘demise’ as the end or failure of an enterprise, its old French meaning of desmettre (dismiss) or, ulti- mately, its death. Of course, although Kee posits that Black T eology was probably epistemologically dated in respect of its formation in the twilight years of ‘modernity’ and the rise of Foucault’s theoretical imagination as a fecund source of postmodernism (RDBT 168), the argument could be turned on its head: our post-modern epistemological situation also means that it is all up for grabs and up for re/de-construction; it means that we can ﬁ nd creative ways to quarry, reappropriate, reposition, reconstitute, and reconﬁ guring this particular contextual God-talk initially systematised by James Cone, ‘the apos- tle’ of Black T eology,

without resorting to the language of ‘demise’ with its connotations of modernity.

Alistair Kee’s book is, undoubtedly, a well-written and important contribu- tion to Black T eology. Some will already see it as ‘setting the cat among the pigeons’, while others may be tempted to ask the political question of the

Freidrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181-82.

James H. Cone, Black T eology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), 1.

In his cablegram from London to a New York newspaper on hearing of his demise, Mark Twain is reported to say: ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration’.

Albert Cleage, author of The Black Messiah a year before Cone’s controversial publication of Black T eology and Black Power , gave Cone this appellation: ‘Dr James H. Cone . . . is our apostle to the Gentiles. He drags white Christians as far as they are able to go (and then some) in inter- preting Black theology within the established framework which they can accept and understand’. See Albert B. Cleage, Jr., Black Christian Nationalism: New Directions for the Black Church (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1972), xvii.

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eficacy (by his own admission/recognition) of a Scottish theologian, ‘as a European’, admonishing black theologians not so much to ‘give up’, but rather that they should ‘move on’ for the sake of the black poor of America, Africa and the third world (RDBT x). Of course, intellectual and hermeneutical per- spectives in Black theological discourse should not be the domain of black theologians only. A theology whose sources (and norms) derived both from Scripture on the one hand, and the black experience and culture on the other hand, is bound to raise tensions and cause a degree of hermeneutical suspi- cion.8 Paul Holmer and T eo Witvliet approached the problem in diﬀ erent ways. The former argued that the stress by many Black theologians on ‘indig- enous sources of the knowledge of God in Black religion’ is in danger of assum- ing that ‘knowledge can not be anything but Black and private’;9 the latter recognised the ‘danger of regarding the hermeneutical circle of black theology as a closed circle which does not have a single point contact with that of so- called white theology’.10

The ‘politicisation’ of the ‘hermeneutical circle’ in Black theological dis- course is a real concern, but it should not disqualify critical participation on racial grounds. Having raised the issue, Kee has nothing to fear in this regard. In other words, one needs to ensure that ideology does not get in the way of epistemology, or critique negated on account of non-rational and racialized predispositions. A classic case of this can be seen in the David Hume’s com- ment on Africans in a footnote where he says: ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites’.11 The problematic is, of course, a conscious and a sub-conscious one in theology, not least in those theologies which designate themselves as ‘political’ and ‘liberational’.

In his A Black T eology of Liberation (Philadelphia & New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1970), 53-74, Cone delineates six ‘sources’ of Black T eology: the black experience, black his- tory, black culture, revelation, Scripture, and tradition. The dialectical relationship between the ‘black condition’ and ‘biblical revelation’ constitutes the ‘norm’ for Black T eology. According to Cone, this ‘norm’— the hermeneutical principle ‘specifying how sources are to be used’— in Black T eology seeks to harmonize two realities: ‘the liberation of black people and the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (79-80).

See Paul Holmer, ‘About Black T eology’, in Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, eds., Black T eology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979 (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979), 189.

See T eo Witvliet, The Way of the Black Messiah (London: SCM Press, 1987), 6.

See his essay ‘Of National Characters’ (1749). The version of 1754 contains the famous footnote, as cited in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 33.

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In six chapters, Kee oﬀ ers a number of important and critical moments in the development of Black consciousness and Black T eology in South Africa, the USA, and the UK. T ere are at least three explicit aims in Kee’s book: ﬁrstly, to point out the manifold failures and inadequacies of Black T eology; secondly, to demonstrate the theological thinness and contextual inappropri- ateness of the repeated four ‘mantras of a previous period’ (i.e., that God frees slaves as seen in the Exodus narrative; the passing reference and reality of the liberation of the captives in Luke 4:18 as a dominant motif; the promise to address oppression caused on the basis of race, gender and class; and the rep- etition of Du Bois’ uncontested claim ‘that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line’’ ’) (RDBT vii-viii); thirdly, to urge (having highlighted the intellectual and theological failures in the enterprise) black theologian not to ‘give up, but that they should move on, for the sake of the black poor of America, Africa and the third world’ (RDBT x).

Kee’s critique resurrects a number of important ﬁ gures in modern black political and religious iconography, including Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, and Franz Fanon. In his opening chapter (‘Assimilation and Alienation: Double Consciousness’), Kee judiciously deals with the cultural geography of negritude as essentially a francophone Afro-Caribbean cultural movement positively celebrating and reclaiming a black culture that had been dismissed as primitive barbarism.12 The philosophy of negritude highlights and mirrors some of the methodological and political problems that are encoun- tered in Black T eology and black consciousness in later chapters. And, according to Kee, it is with Sartre’s preface to Senghor’s anthology of negritude poetry in 1948, in which he describes negritude as ‘a certain quality common to the thought and behaviour of black people’,13 that negritude is given a much wider currency and philosophical dimension.14 Needless to say, there were close relationships and interactions between the formation of negritude and the Harlem Renaissance at a time when there was a preoccupation with

As an “aesthetic ideology” and as “protest literature” negritude, according to Emmanuel Ngara, “will always remain one of the most signiﬁ cant literary movements to have arisen in Africa”; see Ngara’s Ideology and Form in African Poetry: Implications for Communication (Lon- don: James Currey, 1990), 23.

See David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical T eory (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 266.

Soliciting Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction (“ Orphée Noir”) to his anthology of poetry was, according to Melvin Dixon, ‘a brilliant ploy by Senghor to ensure a wide readership’. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Collected Poetry , translated and introduced by Melvin Dixon (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia Press), xxxiii.

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what Foucault calls the ‘thematics of blood’ and the rise of Nazism.15 Indeed, Senghor’s encounter with the writings of Goethe while conﬁ ned for two years in German prison camps had a profound inﬂ uence on him and his writings. Interestingly enough, Kee sees the birth of negritude (at least as exempliﬁ ed in its key intellectual architects, Senghor and Césaire) as a problem of the crisis occasioned by the privileged attained through education and the existential contradictions of assimilationism in French colonial policy.

According to this policy one is encouraged ‘to transfer his loyalty from his own people and their culture, to France and its culture’ (RDBT 7), but is never made to feel French in the colonial metropolis. Indeed, Fanon spoke of the renunciation that takes place in language, culture and ‘phenotype’ of the black person as they conform to metropolitan stereotype.16 According to Kee, Seng- hor, Césaire, and Fanon are products of assimilation and only ‘the asimilados suﬀ er from double consciousness’ ( RBDT 8). In Césaire’s case he sees the pro- cess of assimilation being incomplete (contributing to Césaire’s breakdown); in Fanon’s case the process ‘seemed to be complete’ (he married a white woman in 1953).17 Kee takes exception to the historic and cultural romantisation of Africa and sacralising of black people in negritude; he is also dismissive of Senghor’s ‘new planetary civilization’ (what he sees as negritude’s ‘incoherence’ in advocating ‘democratic socialism’ without reference to the preceding stages of Marxism in its scientiﬁ c form) as a middle course between the old Soviet Union and the USA.

In the account Kees gives of the development of Black T eology in South Africa in chapter 2, he is keen to point out that, ‘contrary to what might be assumed’, this theology did not arise because of inﬂ uences from America. Its political, theoretical and economic sources ‘lay entirely within Africa’. T is is a strange, but a rather interesting observation. Of course, this depends on how one deﬁ nes ‘inﬂ uences’ in this context. And no one seriously acquainted with the literature would necessarily make this assumption. Indeed, that’s the point

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 148, cited in Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: Penguin, 2000), 67.

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1967), 18: ‘He becomes’, says Fanon, ‘whiter as he renounces his blackness . . . . The black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his pheno- type undergoes a deﬁ nite, an absolute mutation’.

Kee says this is ‘the highest aspiration of the mulatto’ ( RDBT 10). In his Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon goes further: he talks about ‘the double process’ and the ‘epidermalization’ of infe- riority that causes Black men to want ‘to be white’ and express reservations about the white man’s humanity: ‘The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level’.

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of ‘contextual’ theologies: they arise out of the particularity of historical con- texts and moments, creating a dialectical relationship between context and theological expressions. Bishop Tutu alluded to this in speaking of the ‘scandal of particularity’, as well as the ‘close similarities between African T eology and Black T eology’. According to Tutu, both theologies have arisen as reaction against ‘unacceptable state of aﬀ airs’, ‘deplorable conditions’; and both theolo- gies give the black man ‘a proper pride in things black and African’.18

Kee rightly pays tribute to the role of Steve Biko in the development of Black consciousness in South Africa. However, the contrast (a similar exercise is performed on James Cone and Albert Cleage, and I shall return to this later) he makes between Biko and Mandela is a false one, displaying the way in which he allows his brand of radical polemics to get the better of him. Com- menting on Mandela’s 1964 speech at the famous trial in Pretoria, Kee opines that it ‘presents an analysis and a programme which was ﬂ awed, and which failed’ (RBDT 72). He goes on to state: ‘The demise of apartheid is attribut- able to the rise of black consciousness. Its architect was not Nelson Mandela, but Bantu Stephen Biko’ (RBDT 72). This is an assertion, not an argument. It fails to understand the multi-dimensional nature of the struggle against apart- heid and the continuity in the political culture and contribution of both Man- dela and Biko. The political isonomy that Mandela spoke of in 1964 and the ‘black consciousness’ spoken of by Bike arise out of the same conditions of disenfranchisement and dehumanisation. Ultimately, Biko paid for it with his life; Mandela was incarcerated for twenty seven years. However, it was behind bars, as Denis Healey rightly states,19 that Mandela exercised immense ‘moral authority,’ and this authority created in turn ‘the shift in political power’ that brought about the end of apartheid and ‘the embodiment of the spirit of rec- onciliation’ and the new South Africa.20

Kee oﬀ ers us an impressive collection of black theologians and critics, com- menting on their internal contradictions and on their political and theological shortcomings, and displaying his theological and intellectual opprobrium of their views. T eologically, James Cone is a failure precisely because he fails to

Desmond M. Tutu, ‘Black T eology/African T eology — Soul Mates or Antagonists?’ in Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, eds., Black T eology: A Documentary History, 1966- 1979 (New York: Orbis Books, 1979), 486.

Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 358. As Defense Sec- retary of the British Government, Healey ﬁrst visited Mandela in prison in 1970.

See John Reader, Africa: A Biography of a Continent (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 676- 77, and F. W. De Klerk’s autobiography, The Last Trek — A New Beginning (London: Pan Books, 2000), 346.

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put ‘critical distance’ (RDBT 57) between Black Power and Black T eology. With all the other things taking place in the world at the time Cone published his Black T eology and Black Power in the late 1960s, Kee takes exception to what he calls Cone’s extraordinary claim that ‘Black Power is Christ’s central message to twentieth-century America’ and that Christianity ‘is Black Power’. Why, asks Kee, should there be a speciﬁ cally Christian view of the Black Power movement? We do not see ‘God in goretex or Christ in a condom’, so why should we seek to see the divine in Black Power? This ‘religious legitimation of the ideology of Black Power’ (RDBT 58) — what one might call Cone’s origi- nal sin in Kee’s eyes — is the fundamental issue.

In the theo-politcal collage assembled in Kee’s critique, people like Marcus Garvey, Albert Cleage, and Cornel West get something of a sympathetic hear- ing. Garvey (the Provisional President of Africa driven about in a large con- vertible ‘wearing a uniform which must have been the envy of many a circus master’), because he had a programme which ‘threatened to make a diﬀ erence’ (RDBT 31); Cleage, because, unlike Cone, he had a ‘vision’ which stood ‘over and against the ideology’ (RDBT 58) of Black power and it sacralising of black people (even when they are ‘looters’ and ‘rioters’); West, because he remains the most sophisticated critical resource available to Black T eology for under- standing the ‘mechanism of capitalism’ and the dialogue needed between ‘pro- gressive Marxism and prophetic black Christianity’ (RDBT 176).

Nearer home there is some praise for Robert Beckford and his ‘Dread’ political theol- ogy for the UK (even though Kee ﬁ nds Beckford’s ‘Dread Christ’ predictable and ‘disappointing’). Here I think Kee fails to understand the nature of the Black Church and the Black Christian community for whom Beckford pur- ports to speak. The ‘Dread Christ’ thesis may be ‘an exciting prospect’ ( RBDT 164), but it has little eficacy or relevance in UK Black Church theology or ecclesiology precisely because of its connotations and identiﬁ cation with Ras- tafarian ideology. This is, undoubtedly, a case where the symbolism/metaphor gets in the way of the message.

Of the ‘third mantra’ of Black T eology (i.e., its addressing of oppression arising out of race, gender and class), it is to gender and ‘Womanist T eology’ that Kee is most severe in his criticism. Here Kee is at best dismissive; at worse

Of course, West was advocating this over twenty ﬁ ve years ago in his Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982). The alli- ance, argues West, ‘of prophetic Christianity and progressive Marxism provides a last humane hope for mankind’ (see chapter 4, “Progressive Afro-American Christian T ought and Prophetic Marxism”, 95).

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he is patronising. In most cases, Kee views womanist theology as defective theoretically and theologically. In fact it is characterised by a number recurring features, including ‘little or no theology’, a rehearsing of ‘the main themes of womanist theory’, an inability ‘to criticise secularist womanist theory’ (RDBT 111). The problem with ‘womanist theology’ is not only its ‘ambiguous atti- tude to the Bible’ (RDBT 112) and its marginalisation of theory (there is some guarded praise for Kelly Brown Douglas’ use of ‘European theory’, in this case Foucault, to inform womanist theology), but also its use of black women’s experience as a distinctive source for its theology. Although Kee grudgingly admits that there is a place for the experience of black women, he appears to miss an important methodological and epistemological point about experi- ence in all forms of discourse — what Michael Polanyi describes as ‘personal knowledge’, or the ‘fusion of the personal and the objective’.22

Kee’s attack upon what he calls the four ‘mantras’ of Black T eology pro- vides an exploration of interesting vignettes of the diversity and theo-cultural and political fecundity among black theologians and public intellectuals. What I ﬁ nd interesting is the absence of a coherent argument for the ‘demise’ of Black T eology, or an indication of key moments in the decline of Black T eology. And whilst he implies that the thirtieth anniversary collection of essays in honour of the publication of Cone’s Black T eology and Black Power can be deﬁ ned as one such moment,

the case he makes is not convincing, notwithstanding the question posed by Gayraud Wilmore at this thirtieth anniversary conference Kee uses as evidence to support his thesis (RDBT 196) as to ‘whether or not black theology ought not to be pronounced dead at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago’.24 Additionally, there is no attempt to appreciate what the notion of ‘Black T eology’ and many of its associated themes and functions might mean for the Black Church and for many outside the academic community as a conceptual tool for personal, social, and spiritual transformation. The phenomenon of the Original African Heritage Study Bible (1993) with its editorial disclosure (not to mention its black representation and iconography) of the hermeneutics of Black/African ‘exclusion’ from the Biblical heritage and the Eurocentric recasting of the ‘entire Bible into a saga of European people’ is a case in point in this transfor-

See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

See Dwight N. Hopkins, ed., Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James Cone’s Black T eology and Black Power (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999).

Cited from Gayraud S. Wilmore, “Black T eology at the Turn of the Century: Some Unmet Needs and Challenges,” in Hopkins, ed., Black Faith and Public Talk, 236.

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mation.25 Of course, there is some truth in the point Kee makes in his conclu- sion on ‘academic careers’ built upon Black T eology and, therefore, requiring its perpetuation (RDBT 196), but that is not the same as saying that it has outlived its usefulness and critical function. Kee is in danger of making a cat- egory mistake about the demise of Black T eology.

For one so passionate in his exhortation for Black T eologians to change direction, it’s a pity he oﬀ ers no constructive programme, or theo-political template, for the future of Black T eology beyond asserting that they should ‘move on, for the sake of the black poor of America, Africa and the third world’. If theology is still a function of the church, then surely this is not just a task for ‘Black T eology’ and Black theologians. It is a task for all of us. The international Micah Challenge to reduce global poverty and other consequences of poverty by 2015 is a project worthy of an urgent and more eﬀ ective alliance between churches and theologians across the culture and ‘colour line’. For someone writing about the demise of Black T eology I suspect, ironically, Kee’s book will prolong the life of this particular discourse. In this regard he has performed an invaluable service.

See The Original African Heritage Study Bible , gen. ed., Cain Hope Felder (Nashville: The James C. Winston Publishing Company, 1993), viii.

An Obituary For The Wrong Subject A Response To Alistair Kees The Rise And Demise Of Black Theology

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