Black theology can be broadly understood as the self-conscious attempt to undertake rational and disciplined conversation about God and God’s relationship to Black people within history (Hopkins 1999: 1-14). An important aspect of Black theology is the extent to which it attends to the existential realities of the lived experience of Black people within history, both past and present epochs. This emphasis upon the lived realities of Black people is one that seeks to displace notions of theology being purely abstract and distant from the needs of ordinary people in this world. Black theology exhibits a minimal concern with theoretical metaphysical speculations, such as musings on heaven, and the preservation of the immortal soul in the next life, as opposed to concentrating its efforts on dignity and full life in this world. The God that is at the center of Black theology is the one who is largely, although not exclusively, understood in terms of God’s revelation in “Jesus Christ” in the light of the historical and contemporary reality of Black suffering. The dominant understanding of “Black theology” is that which falls within the Christian purview. It is a specific self-named enterprise of reinterpreting the meaning of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, in light of the very real experiences of oppression and suffering of Black people. This approach to engaging within the Christian tradition is not unlike other forms of “Theologies of Liberation” in that its starting-point is the existential reality of being an oppressed person in the world (Fabella and Sugirtharajah 2000; Parratt 2004; Althaus-Reid, Patrella and Susin 2007). In the case of Black theology, it is the reality of being a Black person in a world run by powerful White people for their own benefit and for those like them. Black theology begins with one’s sacred reffections on Blackness and the Black experience, which is placed in an ongoing dialogue with the Bible and the resultant traditions that emerge from within Christianity (Reddie 2006; Jagessar and Reddie 2007a; Jagessar and Reddie 2007b). This enterprise named “Black theology” has branches across the world. The most obvious and perhaps significant examples can be found in such diverse places as North America (see Wilmore and Cone 1979; Cone and Wilmore 1993), the Anglophone Caribbean (see Erskine 1981; Davis 1990; Williams 1994), Hispanic Caribbean (Gonzalez 2006) South America, particularly Brazil (Sant’Ana 2009), Southern Africa (Mosala 1989; Mosala and Tlhagale 1986), in mainland Europe, particularly in the Netherlands (Witvliet 1985) and in Britain (Beckford 1998; Reddie 2006). In these differing contexts, the point of departure for Black theology is the reality of being “Black” in the world, and the concomitant experience that grows out of this lived actuality of how the world has often treated Black people of African descent. Black theology is a dialogue between the materiality of human experience and the spiritual and theological resources of the Christian tradition, the latter seeking to give meaning and dignity to the former. This relationship between Black experience and Christianity continues, for the most part, to be the usual conduit that constitutes the ongoing development of Black theology across the world. More will be said on the relationship between Black theology and the superstructure that is Christianity at a later juncture in this chapter. Black theology has grown out of the ongoing struggles of Black peoples to afirm their identity and very humanity in the face of seemingly insuperable odds (see Hopkins 1999: 11-36). African American scholars, such as Asante, for example, estimate that upwards of 50 million African people were transported between Africa and the Americas over a four-hundred-year period (Asante 1990: 3-12). Inherent within the chattel slavery of the transatlantic slave trade was a form of biased, racialized teaching that asserted the inferiority and sub-human nature of the Black self (Williams 1983). The continued struggles of Black people that arise from the era of slavery can be seen in the overarching material poverty and marginalization of Black people across the world (Hopkins 2002: 127-54).
