Black is the Spirit, Black is the Skin - pt. 2
Celebrating the African roots of Black Christianity
Throughout Black history month I am highlighting the four categories of African cultural values identified by Dr. Vince Bantu. These cultural values exist across the Diaspora within and without Christian contexts. But within the universal church, these are the cultural values which differentiate the Black Christian tradition from other cultural expressions of Christianity. The four cultural values are: Rit’at, Seuartukonk, Ujamaa, and Boa me na me mmoa wo. All four are African terms pulled from various African languages.
This week’s focus is Rit’at—an Ethiopian word which means “right” or “orthodox.” It incorporates values like truth, holiness, and worship. In this series and in the poem which inspired it, I use Athanasius as an example of Rit’at. He is our proof that orthodoxy has always mattered to Black Christians.
I grew up in a White evangelical tradition that perceived the Black church as not quite up to snuff. I mean, yeah, they worshipped the same Jesus—and passionately, too!—but their songs were too materialistic. Gospel music was always talking about somebody’s bills getting paid rather than detailing spiritual transformations of the inner man and the metaphysical victories won as a result of faith. Also, the Black church was so hierarchical. There were always bishops and deacons, and everybody treated the pastor as if he were T.D. Jakes even if the church had nothing but 10 members. Where we saw hierarchy we assumed legalism. And, the Black church was always so political too. Why did they have politicians soapboxing their pulpits? Democrats at that! Sure they had some version of the Christian religion, but theirs wasn’t the right one. There’s was just a little too jaded, just a little too encumbered by the things of this world.
Hear me, these criticisms of the Black church weren’t ever blatantly preached from my church’s pulpit. They weren’t even much discussed in pews. The Black church wasn’t enough of a threat for that. These were more like unspoken, underlying assumptions that justified and perpetuated the racial segregation of our Sunday morning service. Of course, there was a certain amount of influence from the Black church that was permitted in our congregations, conferences, and Christian radio stations. Israel Houghton sounded Black enough to be representative, but he sang about the same old metaphysical intangibles that made him palatable. When Lecrae and the 116 crew came around, they were gospel-focused always. They didn’t get too weighed down by the worldly and the political… until they did.
In recent years Black Christian artists and thinkers like Lecrae and Sho Baraka have been vocal about the backlash they’ve experienced from their evangelical fanbase when speaking out against racial injustice. Lecrae’s concerts and contracts were cancelled as a result of tweets criticizing evangelicalism. Sho Baraka’s album was removed from Christian bookstores for broaching topics pertaining to race. Yet, these men have never denounced their faith nor deviated from their conviction that salvation is achieved through Christ alone. These are devout believers who have founded their faith on traditional doctrine. But their association with Black culture seems too strong a departure from what feels orthodox to the White evangelical church.
To be fair, there is a stark contrast between the theology of Black churches and the academic discipline of Black Theology (capital T). The difference is akin to the division between White mainline and evangelical traditions. Where mainline churches emphasize justice but have compromised on traditional beliefs in Scriptural authority, moralism, and sexuality; evangelical churches conserve these traditions but neglect the responsibility to confront injustice. Similar to mainline churches, Black Theology majors on issues of justice, but it makes that justice the exclusive hermeneutical lens through which it accepts Scripture’s authority.
Unlike the Black Theology, evangelical, and mainline traditions, the Black church tradition has retained both its concern for orthodoxy and justice. It isn’t one or the other in the Black church; it is both. In other words—just because a Black Christian demands social justice, protests police brutality, or decries systemic racism does not mean he or she has given up on traditional Christian values, a belief in the authority of Scripture, or the desire for personal holiness. In fact, the opposite is true! Our passionate cry for social justice is the overflow of our devotion to the Truth of God’s Word and the seriousness with which we take its demand for righteousness. Social justice does not require of us a compromise of orthodoxy.
Perhaps that statement seems obvious to Black Christians because our tradition has always valued orthodoxy, reaching as far back to the original church patriarchs of Africa.
All orthodox Christians, East and West, consider the Council of Nicaea to be a bedrock event for the development of Christian doctrine. It was at this ecumenical council in 325CE that the unity of God the Father and Christ the Son was determined, and the competing Arian view deemed heretical. The council was called by the Roman emperor, Constantine, but it involved church leaders across the vast Roman empire from Africa to Persia. Athanasius attended the council as a representative of Egypt—a deacon at the time, though he would eventually become the bishop of Alexandria. Throughout his life Athanasius remained the foremost proponent of the Trinitarian view. He did not prescribe to Arian lies but defied them… restored the Father to the Son from the ones who tried to divide them. It is Athanasius’ conceptions that we find woven throughout the Nicene Creed, which is today professed by countless Christians across the world. Not only that but Athanasius was the first to canonize the 27 books of the New Testament!
In these ways, Athanasius’ contributions to the faith are “universal.” He helped establish for the church of East as well as the West our foundational Trinitarian beliefs and the authority of Scripture. But in the West, Athanasius is often seen through a Roman Catholic filter because that is how his legacy has reached us. Yet, Athanasius’ figure also looms large in the Coptic church, which celebrates his legacy as home-grown. To them, Athanasius is not merely a champion of orthodoxy in word only but in his willingness to suffer persecution for the Truth, as Coptic Christians have done for centuries. Athanasius is important to Africans beyond Egypt as well. Christians in Subsaharan Nubia and Ethiopia would have no doubt received the message of the gospel by way of Coptic Christians, whose tradition was defined, in part, by Athanasius’ legacy.
When I started this project, I asked my artist friend, Justin White, to help me celebrate the Blackness of Athanasius (and others) by re-imaging him as dark skinned. My hope is that perhaps seeing his Blackness will help establish a connection between his legacy and that of the Black church.
We see Athanasius’ legacy in the Black church with its high regard for Scripture. In the Black church there is an explicit expectation that the preacher “rightly divide the Word.” James Weldon Johnson, the poet and author of the Black National Anthem, articulates this expectation in one of my favorite poems, “Listen Lord.” The poem imitates and intones a prayer one might hear at a Sunday morning service down South. An exhorter would pray this prayer over the preacher before he steps to the pulpit:
“And, O Lord, this man of God
Who breaks the bread of life this morning
Pin his ear to the wisdom post,
And make his words sledge hammers of truth.”
Black Christians don’t want no leaders whose ears aren’t pinned to the wisdom post, whose words don’t pack the punch of truth. Truth is an incomparable value to Black Christians. And most Black Christians recognize, as Athanasius did, that a main source for the revelation of God’s Truth is His Holy Scriptures.
In the letter where Athanasius canonized the books of the New Testament, he wrote: “These [books] are fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain.” Praise God for the Words that wash over us like fountains of salvation! And praise Him for the Black hands He chose to preserve and pass them on to us!