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Review Summary: A Search for a Universal Image of Christ... |
Date: 2007-11-16 |
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Details: Christ is black. But appearance is only a piece of it; Christ is black in his solidarity with the Black community in US America, struggling in the face of White racism. Kelly Brown Douglas, in this quick and to-the-point synopsis, re-members the historical origins of the black Christ, his theological development and then asks some critical questions about the black Christ in her own context - now almost fifteen years ago.
We enter the history, with Douglas, during the height of slavery in US America. Douglas identifies two types of Christianity that live among both Blacks and Whites in the States at that time. "Slave Christianity" saw Jesus (the Black Christ) as liberator, identifying with the Black community's struggle for health and freedom. "Slaveholding Christianity" justified slavery and made Jesus (the White Christ) into an icon of hope for the future - things would be better in the "bye and bye." The Black Christ, then, as Douglas argues, developed early - if not explicitly - within the imaginations of adherents to "Slave Christianity."
During the Civil Rights Struggle and Black Nationalist movements of the sixties and seventies, people like Martin King and Malcolm X propelled concepts of the Black Christ into more explicit - and public - consideration. Culminating in X's claim in a 1963 interview that "Christ wasn't white; Christ was a black man," Black Christianity - like Slave Christianity before it - began, more explicitly, to highlight Christ's connection to the struggle for Black freedom in the context of lived history - disregarding for a time "Slaveholding (White) Christianity's "bye and bye."
Forced into action, Douglas claims, by the bold, public assertions of people like King and X about the nature of Black Christianity - and the Black Christ - Black theologians began thinking critically about the color of Christ. By the early seventies, though in differently nuanced ways, three Black theologians - Albert Cleage, James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts - had claimed that, indeed, Christ was black. Cleage thought Jesus was historically a black man. Cone imagined his blackness to lie sufficiently in his struggle with Black people. And Roberts understood his blackness to be a particularizing image among many possibilities of imaging Jesus in the world.
But, Kelly Brown Douglas wonders, is Christ's blackness enough. She, along with other womanist scholars, question whether race is the only obstacle on the path toward freedom. She imagines, in the end, that the blackness of Jesus is only one part in the multifaceted struggle which with he identifies. Christ is Black, she affirms, but suggests he's also female, same-sex oriented, economically disadvantaged and so on.
Douglas, I think, does a helpful thing in so clearly and concisely presenting the history of the Black Christ. For those who've never imagined the possibility of a black Christ - either White or Black; for those who've been inclined to accept a black Christ, but who lacked the historical precedents to justify it; and for those, too, who've considered the Black Christ a psychological invention of the black consciousness era; Douglas' The Black Christ provides clarifying history, which must (if only by exhibiting the metaphor's historical staying power) be taken seriously. Her elucidation of the Black Christ's origins in US American, Black "Slave Christianity" is particularly helpful, I think, in establishing precedence - and socio-intellectual credibility - for the Black Nationalists' bold claims in the sixties. Douglas' seamless portrayal of the social and intellectual movement, in relation to the Black Christ through history, illustrates a Black Christ that is and has been necessarily central to Christian worship and theology in US American Black communities.
The 117 pages of Douglas' The Black Christ tell a remarkably long tale of Black struggle in remarkably few pages. Her work, simply in terms of "brevity" and "breadth" is impressive. Positively, this approach welcomes readers who are looking for a quick, clear history of the topic. But this approach limits what Douglas is able to accomplish. Even as it is, on the one hand, a strength, one of the main problems with the book is its brevity - Douglas doesn't give enough attention to her subject, in general, and her conclusion, in particular. So much of the work she does here begs for further nuance and illustration. I will re-member one of these cases and tease you with the basics of another.
First, Douglas too quickly dismisses black, male theologians, in particular J. Deotis Roberts, in their understandings of the Black Christ. Essentially, Douglas ends up saying that the Black Christ - as it has historically (and theologically) been represented - isn't "enough." She understands Christ's solidarity to be not only in terms of blackness, but also in terms of gender, sexual orientation and so on - standing by all oppressed people groups. Similarly, at least in the way Douglas represented him, J. Deotis Roberts considered Christ applicable ("universal") to all kinds of human situations. Speaking in terms of race, but suggestive of other social categories, Roberts writes that like the White Christ or the Red Christ, "the Black Messiah is also the universal word made flesh." Later, in response to internal (Black) critiques that he was acquiescing to the Academy in his assertion of a universal Christ, Roberts said he didn't want Black theologians to make "Jesus a captive of black culture as [they] reject the cultural captivity of Jesus depicted by Euro-Americans." Clearly Roberts was trying to develop an image of Christ, even as Douglas admits, "that was not potentially exclusive or oppressive of others."
Despite her recognition of Roberts' attempt to diversify Black understandings of Christ's solidarity, Douglas - in her conclusion - overshadows this nuance to move to her main point. She roundly critiques the work that Black, male theologians have done, highlighting again that "calling Christ Black does not acknowledge that skin color is not the only barrier to Black liberation." To her credit, Douglas exploited what Roberts didn't explicitly say, to make her point more resolutely. Without explicitly recognizing the oppression within the Black community, Christ - as black male, but not as black female or black same-sex oriented - cannot be wholly liberating.
Attention should not be diverted from Douglas' point - the Black Christ is not adequate. The Black Christ, though, leaves untold, the degree to which Black, male theologian, especially Roberts, (not to mention feminist women - who Douglas admits "contribute," and then harshly critiques,) contributed to the movement from a solely Black Christ to a more wholly liberating image of Jesus.
I have similar concerns - in terms of nuance - with Douglas' attention to Jesus/Christ as icon. Malcolm X hated that the White Christ was hanging in all the churches and that Black people "bowed" to it. Besides calling churches to hang pictures of "heroic" women and men as more appropriate images of Christ in their churches, Douglas does nothing to deal with the profound religious status given to iconography. Jesus - as an historical person (one person, not the "image of Jesus" in others) - will always be an icon. Douglas' dabbling in icon talk begged a more complete exploration of how a diversely identifiable Jesus might be imaged. |
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out of 1 Reviews
