Insights from Black Theology for Christian Faith and Ministry
By Anthony G. Reddie
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
I don’t know where to start!
In a little over 100 pages, this United Methodist scholar has untied all the doctrinal knots that have for years secured my understanding of Christianity. Yes, this reading had predecessors, from The Souls of Black Folk to Caste, and each of these books in my journey into black theology has pulled down its share of pillars; but this book, a revised and expanded edition, gets right to the practice of ministry in ways the others have not.
Anthony G. Reddie is a Jamaican man born in Great Britain, raised in working class neighborhoods of Yorkshire, which is north of both London and Birmingham and east of Manchester. He holds degrees, including the PhD, from the University of Birmingham. He is a distinguished professor of theological ethics at the University of South Africa and is Director of the Centre of Religion and Culture at Regents’ Park College, Oxford University.
But mostly, he is a practitioner of things that undermine the white supremacy that undergirds much of Christian life and faith in England and in the United States. And this book offers us practical strategies for doing the same where we are.
Reddie includes, for instance, Bibles studies for lay people that use text, questions, and activities to pull the participants in new directions; and he gives (with extended introductions) two sermons that upset traditional interpretations (of a parable of Jesus and the doctrine of original sin). All of these present fresh options for the pastor, the preacher, and the teacher.
But mostly I embraced the no-holds-barred exposition of black theology, which he defines early on as “the specific self-named enterprise of reinterpreting the meaning of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, in light of the very real experiences, largely of struggle, oppression and sheer hardship, of Black people” (xi). He expands the meaning of “Black people” to all “who are non-White and who are struggling in solidarity for liberation over and against the forces of White, male-dominated power structures” (xii). It is unclear if Asian people are Black or White; and it is unclear why White and Black are spelled with capital letters, but I am sure there is a reason and a good one.
Reddie extolls the work of James Cone, and throughout the book, has me running to search engines to discover the identities, publications, and locations of a host of people: Robert Beckford, Edward Colston, Cain Hope Felder, Jacquelyn Grant, William R. Jones, James Perkinson, Anthony B. Pinn, and Deloris Williams. Others he quoted were already on my radar, so to speak, but not in my library. I have a long way to go.
Reddie is clear that his aim “is to provide an accessible framework for the radical reinterpretation of the Christian faith for the transformation of ordinary people” (xv) which feeds into my own project: to collaborate with others to create a systematic theology written by white Baptists of the American South that takes seriously the context and history of racism.
Of all the contributions of this volume, none surpass for me his idea of “proverbial wisdom”—the notion that the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures (and the parables of Jesus, he contends) is imitated by the folk wisdom of Black people, which is their ability “to reread and interpret the world by means of our accessing the presence and power of God in the world” (24) and that “Black proverbial wisdom … can be a resource for the Christian formation and nurture of young Black children” (25) and also for the reformulation of a Christian theology that has for too long been held captive by the structured, intellectual arguments of White European men.
One final thought: Reddie describes an exercise in self-identity, whereby each person in a group uses a drawing of five concentric circles to position words of self-description, with the most important words (to the person) in the inner circle and words of diminishing importance placed in the circles further from the center. It illustrates when and how Black people and White people use the words “Black” and “White” to describe themselves. Which is a powerful way to notice how little we White people notice our Whiteness! Which may be the most important place our transformation needs to begin!!
(January 2021)
