Cambridge Companion to Black Theology 2.6

What may be the final installment of my comments on a chapter from the Companion addresses "Black theology and the Bible" by Michael Joseph Brown. Until relatively recently, all Christian traditions took the Bible as the touchstone of theological activity. There have been disagreements aplenty about the relationship of the Bible and tradition, the relationship of ecclesiastic authority and individual interpretation, as well as the relationship of various modes of individual experience and the biblical text. But the place of the Bible as divine revelation, as the subject of formative disciplined study, remained crucial.

However, beginning with the post-Kantian subjective turn in the early nineteenth century, many modern theologians latched onto some form of either idealism or historicism that reoriented the Bible from subject to object of disinterested examination, and the theological task from what the Bible reveals to what the reading community understands. Karl Barth tried to reconcile the pre-modern and modern approaches with limited success. An increasingly post-modern turn has exacerbated the inward bent, and various critical approaches have further narrowed the theological task to considering experience (only) in terms of the twin poles of power and oppression.

As Brown explains, black liberation theology started in the heyday of the Barthian approach:

Following Karl Barth and the so-called neoorthodox position, black theology has adopted in large measure the perspective that the bible is a powerful and important witness to the divine revelation, but that full divine self-disclosure has only occurred in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

As a consequence, "black theology appropriates the biblical corpus in a selective, if not entirely critical, manner." It is important to note, as Brown observes, that in this respect black liberation theology differs black theology on the ground, the attitude of which toward the Bible is "largely fundamentalist and evangelical." Brown freely admits, however, that

African American biblical scholars have largely ignored the perspectives of the people at the heart of black [liberation] theology's concern, marginalized African Americans. ... [S]cholarship in this mode has too often been on behalf of individuals in need of liberation rather than from or in conversation with them.

Brown goes on to describe the vigorous disagreements about the nature and place of the Bible that characterized the middle phase of  black liberation theology. He expresses hope, however, that a new generation of scholars will stop arguing about the place of the Bible in the black theological enterprise and actually do biblical theology as black theologians. I was pleased to note Brown's shout-out for J. Kameron Carter whose book, "Race: A Theological Account" is next on my reading list. (According to Brown, Carter argues for an "explicit connection between black theology and traditional Christian theological reasoning.".)