An African American Systematic Theology
(Second Edition)
James H. Evans, Jr.
A Review by Dwight A Moody
When the student is ready, the proverb says, the teacher will appear. And my experience with this book illustrates perfectly the truth of that bit of wisdom. I had never heard of the book until I came across it in reviewing again recently the Euro-American systematic theology published by my friend Dr. Dan Stiver: Life Together in the Way of Jesus Christ: An Introduction to Christian Theology. The Evans book was published in 1992; and the second edition I bought and read was a 20th anniversary publication, with a new forward, three responses, and an afterward by the author. Evans is professor of systematic theology at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in New York.
The title is taken from the opening line of the introduction to the first edition, words written by Margaret Walker: “We have been believers believing in the black gods of an old land, believing in the secrets of the seeress and the magic of the charmers and the power of the devil’s evil ones.” This quote anchors the text in the African heritage of these American believers, a fact that comes out strongly in some places more than others but especially in the final chapter on eschatology. There Evans contrasts the European focus on the future with the African attention to the past.
But throughout the book, Evans treats the basic ideas common to books of systematic theology (revelation, scripture, God, Jesus, humanity, church, and the future) with an orientation that was, for me, fresh and arresting. Revelation is treated as liberation, as in God reveals through the historical process of liberating people from bondage. Much white theology ignores altogether the classic biblical narrative of liberation—the Exodus from Egypt.
Scripture is read as a book for outsiders rather than, as with most white theology, a book for insiders, furthering Evans’ assertion that the “axis of meaning” in the Bible “is the liberation of the oppressed” (51). The God of black religion in America Evans calls “the ungiven god” to signal the difficulty African Americans have in looking past both their displacement and deprivation as well as the distortions of God in white culture to affirm the presence and power of a deity. Jesus, then, becomes one of the disinherited, of the marginalized, of the forgotten and thus the one who can identify with and rescue the African American.
The most powerful chapter is entitled “On Being Black’ and treats the subject anthropology, or the doctrine of Man or Humanity. “The theme of the nature and destiny of humanity in African American religious thought is, understandably, dominated by the issues of racism” (117). They were literally and legally defined, first, as property, and then secondarily as persons—but only as three fifths of a person!
Chapter six addresses the church, the community of faith, the community of humanity. Black experience in America has forced African American Christians to put the emphasize of the community rather than the individual, reinterpreting salvation as a corporate experience rather than an individual decision for or against something.
The consistent feature of the book is the introduction to the reader of the line of influential black authors, mostly of the last half century: such as Albert Cleage, James Cone, Zora Neale Hurston, George Kelsey, Benjamin Mays, John Mbiti, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, J Deotis Roberts, and Cornel West, in addition to the great triumvirate of W. E. B. DuBois, Howard Thurman, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This sustained rollcall was, for me, an education in and of itself, one I am grateful for even if it has come so late in life, after an entire career of reading only the theology written by white Euro-American thinkers.
This is not a big book—a mere 203 pages plus notes—and many of the chapters included headlined with some version of “Toward an African American Theology of …” in which a brief outline of what a more robust, expansive line of thought might be. But it was big enough for me: for me to understand how parochial my education and development has been and how much there is to read and know and engage in this wide world of Christian theology.
(November 2020)
