REDEEMING THE PROFANED
“For black churches, at their best, evinced, through their actions, an alternative ecclesiology, that is, a radical understanding of the church and of its salvific work, that brought together issues that a so-called Christian slavocracy had endeavored so hard to keep apart—baptism and freedom; bodies and souls; social deliverance and personal salvation; the slavery of sin and the sin of slavery.”
I swam in the dynamic currents of the Pentecostal church growing up. My father’s skin is as rich and deep in color as his culture. In the 80s and 90s, his embodiment created a bridge for black, brown, and white folks to worship together at Calvary Temple Worship Center, the church he has pastored for over 50 years. Our piety was a beautiful amalgam energized by the intersecting cultural streams. Flowing out from this were his relationships, and subsequently my own, with the black church. His was one of preaching; mine was music and media. Over the years, those relationships and the black church itself have remained central to me. I cherish it, but I am not black, nor do I worship weekly at a church anchored in its tradition. Therefore, I approach it with reverence and admiration that is neither too distant nor familiar.
When I think of the black church, multiple qualities come to mind: the arch of its worship, the blues that birthed the rhythm, the homiletical cadence and brilliance, the full-bodied sensuality, the climatic trajectory of word and song that sacramentally frees the body and soul into movement. Socially, it is a communal institution of belonging, creativity, resistance, and epistemology. Warnock’s work, however, quickly knocked any tendency toward romanticism out of me and issued a strong challenge. He did this in two ways: first, by addressing (and I believe making reconciling sense of) the perceived schism of the black church’s essential mission, whether it is established in piety or protest. Second, his work highlights the sources and developments of Black Theology’s prophetic witness, which has always stood in stark contrast to the foundational American heresy: racism.
From the beginning, the black church’s very existence has revealed the great, ongoing chasm of peace and justice in our nation: the black church emerges from the enslavement, segregation, and dehumanization of black people by complicit white Christians and churches. Warnock has me asking questions. How can confessing the Creeds be anything but a blistering reproach in the continuing wake of American slaveholding religion? At the site of this deficit, black theology contends for a Church that is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” As I was reading Warnock, I began to wonder: if context predetermines Christian action (e.g., whether to speak or be silent), and if Christian action is the determinant of what makes something Christian, then I locate Christianity in the advent of the black church and not the dominant religion of its historical context (white churches). Thurman is right, “by some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight the slave undertook the redemption of a religion that the master had profaned in his midst.” Warnock recognizes that the vast history of Christianity condoned slavery, which, for me, intensifies the redemptive paradigmatic shift of the black church and black theology. The greatest hope for churches in the U.S. (and all colonized states) enmeshed with descendant slave-holding religion is the “salvific appropriation” by the oppressed. When I read, “African Americans were not simply redeemed by the faith; they redeemed the faith itself, transforming it into an instrument of liberation,” I felt a deep resonance. Warnock opened up a new way for me to see the movements, work, and witness of the black church (and its theologians) as the liberating, indissoluble whole of the Gospel (evangelism and social responsibility, piety and protest).