Children of the Waters of Meribah

Black Liberation Theology, the Miriamic Tradition, and the Challenges of Twenty-First-Century Empire

Allan Aubrey Boesak

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532656712
  9781532656729
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532656736
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In the decades since Black liberation theology burst onto the scene, it has turned the world of church, society, and academia upside down. It has changed lives and ways of thinking as well. But now there is a question: What lessons has Black theology not learned as times have changed? In this expansion of the 2017 Yale Divinity School Beecher Lectures, Allan Boesak explores this question. If Black liberation theology had taken the issues discussed in these pages much more seriously--struggled with them much more intensely, thoroughly, and honestly--would it have been in a better position to help oppressed black people in Africa, the United States, and oppressed communities everywhere as they have faced the challenges of the last twenty-five years? In a critical, self-critical engagement with feminist and, especially, African feminist theologians in a trans-disciplinary conversation, Allan Boesak, as Black liberation theologian from the Global South, offers tentative but intriguing responses to the vital questions facing Black liberation theology today, particularly those questions raised by the women.

Chapter One

Poisoned Well or Waters of Life?

Black Theology, Black Preaching, Scripture, and the Challenges of Empire

An Imperial Era Not Yet Ended*

The year 2017 marked the 500th year of the Reformation, and Martin Luther’s bold act of October 31, when he published his “Disputation” that included the Ninety-Five Theses, an act that changed the history of the church and the world.1 Helmut Gollwitzer, respected German theologian and pastor of the Confessing Church in the struggle against Nazism, wrote words we would do well to ponder as we consider these historic events:

The Reformation did not change a thing in the fate white people prepared for the colored peoples of the world. Whether Rome, or Wittenberg, or Geneva prevailed; whether it was to be justification through good works or by faith; whether the Decrees of Dordt or the Statements of the Remonstrants were to become the official church doctrine; whether Cromwell or Charles I would be the victor—for the red, yellow, and black people of the world this was all irrelevant. This had no bearing whatsoever on their situation. . . Nothing of all this would stop the capitalistic revolution as the revolution of the white, Christian, Protestant peoples that would spread all over the world to open the era of slavery which even today (albeit not in the same form), is not yet ended.2

I found this citation from Gollwitzer in 1974 and used it in my doctoral dissertation in 1976,3 and James Cone and Gayraud Wilmore included it in their Black Theology compendium in 1979.4 In that compendium, Gollwitzer drove the point home: “For the white confessors of the faith, regardless of their particular Christian hue, the people of color were all destined for bondage; ‘oneness in Christ’ might pertain to heaven, but certainly not on this earth.”5 Gollwitzer’s use of the words “prepared for” means that there is nothing accidental about empire, its intentions and its workings. The era of globalized wealth creation built on invasion, oppression, slavery, and exploitation was an era that Europe and later the United States had indeed well prepared for the nations they overran and colonized to make this enrichment and world domination possible. However, for some reason these truths did not seem to have real impact on our thinking since then. Early on in his writings, James Cone offered this observation:

While not diminishing the importance of Luther’s theological concern, I am sure that if he had been born a black slave, his first question would not have been whether Jesus was present at the Lord’s Table but whether he was really present at the slave’s cabin, whether slaves could expect Jesus to be with them as they tried to survive the cotton field, the whip, and the pistol.6

This insight was both brilliant and correct and an important step toward the continued decolonization of our theological thinking and endeavors, although we did not name it so at the time. On the whole, however, Black theology did not find a way to let the implications of these words—however much they could have helped us plumb the depths of the challenges Black theology is presently facing—steer us into the deeper waters of serious discussion beyond the immediate racial reading of our situation. But Cone’s utterances on Luther and the Lord’s presence followed an earlier comment on the ancient creeds:

I respect what happened at Nicea and Chalcedon and the theological input of the Church Fathers on Christology, but that source alone is inadequate. . . the homoousia question is not a black question.7

I did return to Cone and these insights in a 2009 work:

The Jesus of Nicea, Chalcedon and the ancient creeds—Light from light, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father—was beautiful, but so painfully remote, untouched and unmoved by human misery caused by injustice and inhumanity. Indeed, in the rendition of the European Renaissance, this Jesus was too beautiful, too aloof, too aristocratic for the pain, filth and ugliness of slavery and degradation, too light for the darkness of our misery as black people. The Jesus of Constantinian Christianity, without the crown of thorns, but with the crown of laurels, with his wounded hands holding the sword and the standard of the empire, in whose holy name we were caught and chained, disrobed and shamed, flayed and slaughtered, disowned, unnamed and unmade and finally baptized—that Jesus bore no resemblance at all to the Human Son.8

Still, though I did understand that the Christ of the creeds was too far removed from the “messiness of human life” as Jeorg Rieger puts it,9 I did not take it any further than as reflection upon the understanding of the Human Child within the situation of oppression, occupation, and humiliation as the black Messiah of the black situation of racial oppression and humiliation. The scope of these understandings, in their capacity to unmask the realities of empire, did not dawn on me. I did not make and develop the proper connections between church and empire, and how much the deliberations of ecumenical councils called on the insistence and authority of an emperor were done within the imperial context, to the imperial pleasure, and to what extent the theology of the creeds reflected imperial ideology.10

So in one sense, Cone was correct: the homoousia question, of the coequality of Jesus with God—coequal with God in terms of his divinity and coequal with us in terms of his humanity—was not a black question, because these were not debates that even remotely took into account the black situation of slavery, genocide, racism, and dehumanization. The homoousia humanity was not a black humanity. In another sense, Cone, and those of us who agreed with him, did not nearly go far enough. We did not discern how much that question, framed within an imperial context and imperial theological mindset, would have theological, social, and political consequences for the people “of the lower strata,” the slaves, the poor, the women, the disenfranchised at the time, and, in turn, would have for us, the black, the poor, the women, the disenfranchised, the newly enslaved, living in an imperial situation that even today “has not yet ended.” The consequences for us, in our response to this present imperial reality, are facing us still.

Although in South Africa we did take Gollwitzer seriously in our engagement with the perversion of the Reformed tradition exposited in the theology of apartheid, we did not grasp the vast ramifications of the argument as it pertains not just to white racism and its onslaught on black humanity but to white supremacy as an essential function of white, global Christian imperialism. We did not fully grasp or engage the reality of empire, its all-encompassing reach, its power to capture, enslave, and exploit not just the entire cultural, political and socio-economic workings of our colonized societies, but its deadly attempt to nullify all that made us human and worthy.11

What Gollwitzer was talking about was the overwhelming reality of empire which, even though it has in the last five centuries or so changed hands from the Europeans and Ottomans to the British, and presently to the Americans, is still not yet ended. So it would indeed not matter whether in the various colonization conquests the colonized were overrun by Catholics or Lutherans, Calvinists or Anglicans, Baptists or Methodists. They would all be representatives of the nations of the rich North, empires that had as their goal the theft of land and people, oppression, slavery, and genocide, all with the express intent of exploitation, deprivation, and enrichment. Invasion and colonization went hand in hand with domination and subjugation, and the Christianization of subject peoples was unthinkable without the demonization of their culture and beliefs, that wide-open door to the eradication of their history and their physical annihilation. Inasmuch as it had to do with doctrine it was purely incidental.

Particularly crucial was the Christianizing of the process, for the purposes of self-righteous rationalization and indemnification at the heart of which was the pulsating darkness of exceptionalism. Central to it all was the Bible, the source of an all-encompassing justification of acts unspeakable in their cruelty, and the sanctifier of bigotry, hatred, and greed so deep it could only exist and endure through the most obstinate denial. It became the preserver of the vilest forms of pseudo-innocence with the deadliest consequences.

At the same time, from the earliest days, the Bible was, and had remained, central in the lives, faith, and struggles of black people suffering under Western Christian imperial rule, and consequently remained just as central in black theological thinking.12 “Even beyond ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Poisoned Well or Waters of Life?
• Chapter 2: The Birthing Stool, the Burning Bush, and the Throne of Pharaoh
• Chapter 3: Standing Her Ground: The Riverbank and the Seashore
• Chapter 4: Drinking from the Waters of Meribah
• Chapter 5: Jesus, A Woman, and Biko’s Ghost
• Chapter 6: The Secret of the Human Child
• Chapter 7: A Bucket, A Well, and the Gendered Politics of Water
• Bibliography