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Books by J. Deotis
Roberts
Faith and Reason; A Comparative Study of Pascal, Bergson, and
James (1962) /
From Puritanism to Platonism in Seventeenth Century England
(1968)
Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology
(1971) /
Black Theology in Dialogue (1987)
The Prophethood of Black Believers: An African
American Political Theology for Ministry
(1994)
Africentric Christianity: A Theological Appraisal for Ministry
(2000) /
Christian Beliefs (2002)
Roots of a Black Future: Family and Church (2002) /
Bonhoeffer and King: Speaking Truth to Power (2005)
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Contextual
Theology
Liberation and Indigenization
By J. Deotis Roberts We live in a time in which the entire human
situation must be explored, a time in which our perspective must
move from the particular to the universal: Universalism is
abstract; particularity is concrete. This move implies a serious
encounter with ethnic theological programs everywhere. The
context of belief, life and action must now be given priority.
Christian theology is required to take the
world of all human beings seriously. All must be reached in
their Lebenswelt if faith is to be a live option.
Theology as developed in Europe and America is limited in its
approach. A "universal" arising from the experience of
a small sample is a myth. Christian theologians so unaware of
the thought and belief of peoples elsewhere in the world make
only a false claims to universalism.
There is no completely universal perspective,
since all human thought and belief are limited by structural
bounds. However, there can be an openness to the universal. When
it is objected that we are dealing with a universal revelation,
we must raise the issue of finite human understanding, through
which God's self-disclosure is communicated. The eventual locus
of divine revelation is our personal, social, cultural, and
ethnic existence.
Christian theologians may generally be
numbered among the colonizers of the peoples of the Third World.
many have been "God's colonizers" not by intention but
by default; the results, however, have been the same. As a
theologian, Albert Schweitzer went beyond most of his peers in
his involvement in Africa. Paradoxically, it is the
manifestation of this European mind, set in an African context,
which dramatizes that his philosophy of civilization is
pro-Western. Aristotelian logic and Palatonic dualism do not
exhaust the thought thought-structures of the human race. It is
arrogant for persons who have been exposed only to these
categories of thought and their derivatives to speak ex cathedra
for all Christians. It is more honest to admit our
particularities.
My eyes have been opened by an exposure to
the thought and belief of Asian and African peoples. The study
of "religion" is the key to a deeper understanding of
a particular religion. This is true of the study of theology as
well. Paul Tillich said to Mircea Eliade late in his life that
if he had an opportunity to begin again, he would study the
history of religions first. The study of world religions is a
great resource for a more meaningful theological understanding.
World religions have not escaped the social Darwinism of the
Western mind, either. It is essential, therefore, to do some
independent study, travel, and field work in order to appreciate
more completely the unity and diversity of the various religions
and the systems of doctrine flowing from them.
Christian theologians and missionaries have
often been the "colonizers" of the minds and spirits
of non-Western people. Non-Western religions were often
dismissed as heathen; the highest compliment was to accept such
a religion as a preparation for the gospel. Western missionaries
were not aware that the very gospel which they sought to
transplant was blighted by the "Constantinian
captivity" of the church. In their pharisaism, they did not
observe anything of worth in other religions or in the cultures
that sustained them.
II
It has deeply enriched my appreciation of the
universal reach of the human spirit to encounter giant
intellects and cosmic spirits in Asia and Africa. In an essay on
"The Theology of Religion" (I.T.C. Journal I/1,
1974), I have argued that a theologian can have his life and
thought enriched by this experience precisely because he views
the faith of other persons from within his own system of belief
and thought.
The search for a cosmic Christ has broadened
my horizon. Christocentrism has not been abated, but Christ as
giver of grace is seen as author of nature and Lord of history
as well. The incarnation remains the center of God's redemptive
revelation. The circumference of revelation, however, has been
expanded. It is through Jesus as the Christ that we now discover
the meaning of God's all-pervasive cosmic revelation. it is
manifest in creation and providence and is in all times and
among all peoples.
My studies in Christian Platonism, centering
on the Cambridge Platonists, during my doctoral program at
Edinburgh and Cambridge universities have made me sensitive to
this vision. The discovery of William Temple's Nature, Man,
and God, together with my personal conversations with Canon
C.E. Raven, a theologian and scientist, opened my mind to this
new perspective.
Islam, as I meet it in South Asia and the
Middle East, pointed to a legal and political outreach of
religion without a rejection of the mystical. One encounters
Islamic theologians, past and present, who blend the spiritual
and political dimensions of faith in one life. This unity led me
to look again at the priestly and prophetic unity in biblical
faith.
All my encounters with humn religious
experience have been invigorating for theological reflection.
The élan vital of preliterate religions, the Tao
of Lao-tzu, the Jen of Confucious, the compassion Buddha,
the Brahman of the Hindus, are examples of the richness
of these explorations. My more recent reflections upon the
African roots of black religion have been a great source of
insight and inspiration. African religions combine the semblance
of the family system of Confucianism with the deep spirituality
of Hinduism and Buddhism. In my view, the African perspective
provides a basis for a holistic interpretation of religious
experience.
What we are developing is a theology of
liberation. if theology is to be more than dry bones for faith,
if it is to address human beings of flesh and blood, if it is to
deal with the ultimate issues of life and death, it must be more
than a logical statement of doctrine -- though it should be
that. theology cannot be truly universal if it refuses to deal
with the particularities of the human situation. It must not,
however, rest with the particular -- it must move from the
particular to the universal. In moving to the universal, it must
not abandon the concrete particular, for there is where we meet
the human situation. There is no abstract universal that makes
any difference in the relief of human misery. There is no
universal revelation which separates salvation history from
political history. Systematic theology must become theological
ethics. It must speak not merely from ivory towers, but from the
marketplace. Theology, to be worthy of the name, must now
address "nonpersons" as well as
"nonbelievers."
III
Theology and ethics are inseparable in the
black religious experience. the context of the faith of black
people is a situation of racist oppression. Religion, and
especially the understanding of the biblical faith, has been the
source of meaning and protest for blacks. Our religious heritage
has nurtured and sustained us through our dark night of
suffering. Without this profound religious experience and the
churches which have institutionalized it, blacks might not have
survived the bitterness of American oppression.
Consciousness is not adequate by itself to
liberate a people; it must be empowered. The assessment of the
"radicalism" of black religion has led to a concern
for operational unity in order to provide a united front against
racism. A black theologian cannot enter into the quest for
personhood and peoplehood of his or her people without having
his or her ethical concern sharpened. Thus, my recent essay "Black
Theological Ethics: A Bibliographical Essay" (Journal
of Religious Ethics, III/1, 1975) has argued the case for
the ethical bent of black theological. In fact, any theology
worth the name must make contact with the human situation in the
context of world history. When one takes the biblical faith and
the incarnation seriously into account, the result is a theology
of liberation. Whether we find ourselves as theologians in the
camp of the oppressor or the oppressed, what we have to
interpret is a gospel of liberation.
My own pilgrimage has been an extended one,
beginning with a search for a reasonable faith. Emotional piety
and intellectual honesty provided a serious conflict. much of my
life has been given to wrestling with truth. The encounter with
natural science, literary, and biblical criticism and philosophy
accelerated the crisis. the anchor which sustained life's
purpose in the passage through doubt to a more mature faith has
been the Bible, reinforced by a steadfast sense of having been
called to a ministry in the church. the philosophical direction
of my mind led me into philosophy of religion and later into
philosophical theology. Much of my early research and writing
were preoccupied with epistemological questions of faith. my
first two books, Faith and Reason (Christopher, 1962) and
From Puritanism to Platonism in Seventeenth Century England (Martinus
Nijhoff, 1968), make this point.
My responsibility has been that of a
theologian of the church. As a systematic theologian in a
theological school within a predominantly black university, I
have sought to interpret the faith for future leaders in the
church. most of my students have been black or non-Western.
their ministry, therefore, has been to all sorts and conditions
of people. Almost from the start I was challenged to match
intellectual honesty with the social and political imperatives
of the gospel. It became clear to me that faith should have the
priority but hat reason should be included. Augustine, Anselm,
and Pascal led me to a faith seeking understanding. Or put
another way, these theologians helped me to find my way.
IV
What we learned from the Detroit Conference
on Liberation Theology (August 1975) was that the North American
reality is different from that of Latin America. We also
discovered that while the mood of black and Latin
American theologies is similar, the context is quite
varied. While oppression most often takes the form of classism
in Latin America, it is evident that racism is most rampant in
the United States. This is not to minimize the obvious fact of
oppression based on sex. Black women experience a double
oppression, but many of them observe that racism is the most
stubborn form of oppression. Furthermore, it is destructive of
the entire black family and community.
We may observe, then, that in this country we
are faced not merely with an overlap or network of oppressions.
There is beyond this, in the experience of blacks, a hierarchy
of oppression, of which racism is the most systemic, historical
and far-reaching form. Blacks as a people are faced constantly
with the threat of nonbeing. On the one hand, genocide could
result from repression, given adequate provocation arising from
sheer frustration. On the other hand, the negative effects of
continued oppression may trigger the self-destructive tendencies
now evident in widespread drug abuse and black-on-black crime.
Existentialism has been most attractive to
black religious thinkers. The experience of racism has prompted
blacks to enter an introspective mood. We are, a long-suffering
people. Our psychic health has been sustained by a faith that
has defied all human limits of endurance. Amid despair and
powerlessness, we have carved out meaning and sanity. We have
been able to hold life together through faith even though we
have not had the ultimate control over our destiny or the issues
of life and death. Existentialism, "a creed for
crises," has been useful to blacks as they have faced the
extreme situation in this country. In an essay titled "Religio-Ethical
Reflections Upon the Experiential Components of a Philosophy of
Black Liberation" (I.T.C. Journal, I/1, 1973), I
have sought to establish these aspects of the psychology of
black religious thought. The existential posture of
Augustine’s "self-understanding," Pascal’s
"reasons of the heart," Bergson’s
"duration," and William James’ "stream of
consciousness" have had a marked impression upon my
thinking.
Discovery of Kierkegaard was a moving
experience. His analysis of human existence seemed unusually
profound, but his revolt against reason repelled me. His
affirmation of the individual seemed wholesome up to a point,
but he did not give sufficient attention to persons in relation
to one another. His critique of religion and society stirred up
my prophetic instincts, but there was an absence of a profound
theological ethic as he insisted on a teleological suspension of
the ethical for the sake of faith. However, there radiated from
his work a penetrating insight into the human "sickness
unto death," which was put in a profound psychotheological
context for me in Tillich’s Courage to Be.
This existential posture of my thinking has
been mixed with a strong mystic bent. Howard Thurman s writings
have been a great inspiration. I find the manner in which he
combines a deep spirituality with a passion for social justice
extremely attractive. The question of how one maintains sanity
in a society bent on inhuman oppression based on race is a
matter that must be faced before one can find health and
wholeness as a person within a community of persons.
V
The type of theological discourse suggested
in this essay requires unitive thinking. It transcends the split
in thought and life of much Western thinking. The discovery of
the total person, the corporate personality and the unity of
humankind leads directly to an understanding of salvation as
liberation.
The existential theologians taught us a great
lesson -- that theology can begin with the human situation as
the locus of God’s revelation. But for the most part, they
overlooked the collective dimensions of human nature. They
unwittingly played into the hands of those who espouse a
privatized expression of faith. The theologians of hope, on
the other account, pushed the collective aspects of human life;
they analyzed human solidarity in oppression and expressed faith
in political terms. The individual is exchanged for the social
being. Anthropology is replaced by eschatology. The either/or
mold of Western thought is evident. The holistic outlook of
thought in the Third World (including the Bible) is not
predominant.
An adequate anthropology will take the
insights of Freud and Marx with all seriousness but will go
beyond them. The imago dei is at the heart of the
Christian understanding of humanity. It is the relation of the
human person to God which is the "wholing" dimension
of human nature. It is essential to move from the human to the
divine and to view the human in the context of this encounter.
If the weakness of traditional theologies has been God-talk, may
It not be that the shortcoming of much theology today is that
Feuerbach’s observation is being fulfilled -- that theology is
becoming only anthropology? While it is the person who is being
approached by God’s revelation of his saving grace, we should
be assured that it is the whole person who is being
considered. The human person is a child of God at the same time
that he or she is a fellow to all humans.
Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black
Theology (Westminster, 1972), my first comprehensive
effort to provide a theology of the black experience, was
dismissed by some as a social treatise. Curiously, other
theological programs developed out of dialogue between the
social sciences and Christian belief have not lost their
recognized theological character: this is true of existential
theology in relation to depth psychology; it holds for Latin
American liberation theology as well and the theologies of hope
in relation to Marxism. And yet a theology which emerges out of
the identity crisis and the social pathology created by racism
is ruled out of court by the theological guardians at the gate.
There is a sense of urgency surrounding the theological task of
black theologians. We will not be silenced by the criticisms of
the theological elite, for we are convinced that we have found a
different and vital way of doing theology.
VI
A Black Political Theology (Westminster,
1974) builds upon the earlier work. In this more recent book
there is an attempt to develop a theological ethic. The context
of black theology is racism in the midst of ethnic pluralism: We
are oppressed in a society that is highly developed
economically, technically and militarily. While Third World
countries experience oppression externally from the United
States, we as blacks experience oppression internally as victims
of racism. A whole set of problems crush our people. We must
not, however, mistake the effects for the cause. If there is not
to be a root-and-branch dismantling of racism, then
unemployment, illiteracy, all sorts of crimes, economic
deprivation and political indifference will continue to destroy
our people.
We have not to this day participated fully
either in the democratic, process or in the prosperity of this
nation. America has been more like Babylon than the promised
land of freedom and brotherhood. As America embarks upon its
bicentennial celebration, it should be remembered that there are
millions of citizens who have been excluded from the American
dream. These have not known this nation as "a righteous
kingdom," but more as an Antichrist. What will America do
to correct this situation today and in the future? What will
America do about its "prides" of race, wealth and
power? These concerns should lay the foundation of a homegrown
theology of liberation.
It has been the genius of black religious
experience to speak to personal and social needs. Without this
bifocal religious affirmation of meaning and protest, we could
not have survived the harshness of our oppression in the
American environment. W. E. B. DuBois illustrated this point in The
Souls of Black Folk, where he speaks mainly to personal
faith. In his "Litany from Atlanta" he raises the
theodicy question as he cries to a God of social justice. This
is the faith of our black parents living still. The "Second
Reconstruction" through which we are now passing
underscores the need for the faith "that has brought us
thus far on the way." It is a faith which is not content
with things as they are. God is a God of Promise, and we
struggle for the freedom which is a gift from this God who makes
all things new.
We need a theology to address the whole
person. Human life must be understood from the depths. Economic
analysis treats only one important dimension of the human
situation. We must consider the existential and the political
aspects of human existence together -- both are important. Human
nature is more than either in the Christian perspective.
Christology is the capstone of a theology of
liberation. The God who wills and acts for the liberation of the
oppressed does so as we encounter him through the words and
deeds of Jesus as the Christ. It is in and through Christ that
we know God, the meaning of history, of life and death, and the
direction of events in human communities. Christ is the center;
he is the liberator. It is through the incarnation that we
discover how we are to become co-laborers in the liberation
struggle.
Salvation is the result of participation in
the liberation struggle. Christ frees us that we may free
others. Christ is the center, but not the circumference of
God’s universal revelation. God’s revelation is in all
nature, all history, and among all peoples. It is our task to
observe where God is at work and to join in the liberation of
the oppressed. Each must discover God in Christ at work where he
or she is and move from that center, being guided by the Spirit,
toward making life more human. It is thus that we are set free
as human beings both from the slavery of sin and the sin of
slavery. It is thus that we participate in liberation in order
to uproot the systems of bondage -- that there may be no slaves
or masters, but a co-humanity in Christ Jesus our Lord, in the
church as an extension of the incarnation and consequently among
all people. Source: The Christian Century (28 January 1976)
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update 28 July 2008
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