Cambridge Guide to Black Theology 2.4

Like the preceding chapter in the Companion, "Black theology and human purpose" by Riggins R. Earl, Jr., takes the biblical text seriously and addresses a set of important and interrelated themes: "self-denial, agency, identity, and liberation." In other words, "what is the difference between the biblical Jesus' command of generic self-denial and the oppressor's forced racial and cultural self-denial?" Simply put, how can those whose self-hoods have been denied understand Jesus' teachings on self-denial? 

More than any contributor thus far, Earl addresses his question from the perspectives of Africans brought to America as slaves and Africans in Africa, many of whom who were evangelized by those freed from slavery. And more than any other, Earl draws on a white theologian, in his case, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Moreover, Earl writes in the first person and addresses other black theologians by way of polite but considered disagreement. 

"The Christological challenge of self-denial is at the heart of black Americans' slave experience," writes Earl. On the one hand,

Slavers declared in the name of Jesus that blacks, other than instrumentally, were of no recognizable agential value. ... Exhorting slaves to be humble like Jesus was the common practice of the slave master.

Yet in the recountings of slave conversions we see "the convert, as a free agent, make the act of self-denial, which consummates in the Cross-bearing life of following Christ, the heart of his/her testimony." The slave would now perceive herself as an agent, not an instrument.The slave too was in the image of God.

In a more contemporary frame of reference, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "civil disobedience leadership, as a form of human purpose, is a model example of one choosing Jesus' voluntary self-denial option response [that leads to] self-actualization." Moreover, the "self-denial commanded by Jesus [also] empowers the oppressed to assert human purpose in a a non-passive, self-agential manner." Human agency, to choose self-denial and/or self-actualization, is at the core of human purpose.

Earl's chapter has much more of value. For example, I found his discussion of the differences in modes of missionary ministry in Africa between whites from England and free blacks from America of particular interest. In any event, this chapter from the Companion is well worth the read.