November 13, 2024

The Anchors of the Black Church

Does it make sense to speak of a single entity called “the Black church?” Or should we instead speak of Black churches, plural, in a nod to the theological and cultural diversity that exists underneath the larger Black church umbrella?

Walter Strickland II charts a range of trends and tendencies in his landmark study of Black faith in America, Swing Low. (The book contains two volumes, one that relates a narrative history of the Black church and another that compiles primary-source writings from key Black church figures.) Yet Strickland, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, identifies a common core of five theological commitments, or “anchors,” that give this tradition an enduring cohesiveness.

Claude Atcho, a Virginia pastor who wrote Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just, reviewed Swing Low for the November/December issue of CT, which went live on our website earlier this week.

“The African American Christian tradition is never merely intellectual,” writes Atcho. “It is inherently celebratory and participatory, its doctrines culminating in praise and action. Likewise, Swing Low embodies the very theological tendencies it describes, which is perhaps its greatest strength. Beyond telling the story of African American Christianity, the book offers a vivid encounter with the Lord at its center. It radiates God’s faithfulness to his church, no matter the oppression or obstacles it faced.

“In particular, Strickland’s narrative demonstrates the enduring witness and gift of Black faith on American soil. Early on, American colonists were frequently hesitant, if not outright unwilling, to evangelize Black slaves. One missionary, Francis Le Jau, insisted that slaves sign a pledge, wherein they promised not to ‘ask for holy baptism out of any design to free [themselves] … but merely for the good of [their souls].’

“This form of Christianity, to borrow the language of Strickland’s fifth anchor, was purposefully devoid of deliverance. Out of this truncated gospel, however, African American Christians recovered the deliverance motif that runs through Scripture, setting ‘trajectories for African American Christianity that are evident among Black Christians today.’ In refusing to accept a slaveholder’s gospel, Black believers cultivated a more biblical expression of Christian faith on American soil, one rooted in the love of God and neighbor. They advanced a gospel that touches body and soul.

“In such ways, the advent of Black Christianity played a pivotal role in fusing orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice). In a famed second-century apologetic for Christianity, the Epistle to Diognetus, the anonymous author states that ‘the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body.’ Reading Strickland’s account, one can hardly help concluding that God, in his providence, appointed the Black church as a corrective conscience to its white counterpart—a cleansing ecclesial soul to a compromised ecclesial body.”

Tending and Keeping the Christian Past

The concept of a priesthood of all believers is familiar within Protestant Christianity. Protestant traditions, of course, recognize formal offices in the church, like pastors and elders. But they also charge all followers of Jesus with “ministering” the truths of Scripture to each other through such means as encouragement, exhortation, edification, and rebuke.

Just as believers are called to act as caretakers of our gospel inheritance, argues Australian scholar and Christian convert Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, they are also called to act as caretakers of our historical inheritance. Her new book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age, summons all Christians—not just Christian historians—to the work of “tending and keeping” our ancestors’ legacies.

In his review for the November/December issue, Bethel University history professor Christopher Gehrz argues that there are gaps in Irving-Stonebraker’s understanding of this “priestly” mission.

“[I]f Irving-Stonebraker’s critique of the Ahistoric Age is mostly persuasive,” writes Gehrz, “it’s also incomplete, leaving unexamined or underexamined two versions of ahistoricism that are particularly influential among some groups of Christians.

“First, she doesn’t seem to realize the wide popularity of providential history within certain evangelical circles. Plenty of American believers are convinced that God has specially called and blessed the United States and continues to superintend its unfolding history.

“This is certainly a way of finding identity in a story that claims transcendent meaning, but as many other Christian historians have long argued, such an interpretation of the past is deeply problematic on both historical and theological grounds.

“Second, it’s dismaying that Irving-Stonebraker has so little to say about the ahistorical thinking that undergirds promises to ‘make America great again.’ Perhaps this is less of a problem in Australia than it is in the US, but what CT editor in chief Russell Moore wrote in a 2016 New York Times piece remains true in 2024: ‘White American Christians who respond to cultural tumult with nostalgia . . . are blinding themselves to the injustices faced by their black and brown brothers and sisters in the supposedly idyllic Mayberry of white Christian America.’

“To her credit, Irving-Stonebraker doesn’t want us to look at the past ‘through rose-tinted sentimentality.’ Nor would she have us look away from ‘the horrific wrongs of history.’ Chapter 7 introduces abolitionists like Mary Prince, Anne Hart Gilbert, and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites. And chapter 8 presents Frederick Douglass as ‘a model of how to engage with the sin of the past,’ someone who called out the sources of injustice while holding out hope for redemption.

“However, Irving-Stonebraker would rather celebrate Christian opposition to evils like white supremacy than examine Christian complicity in them. On balance, she spends far more time suggesting how Christians can keep or ‘guard’ the past (holding to historic orthodoxy, retrieving past practices for discipleship, telling inspirational stories of Christian witness) than how they can tend it, which includes reckoning with noble and ignoble legacies alike.”

Matt Reynolds

Senior Editor, Books

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in the magazine

Our September/October issue explores themes in spiritual formation and uncovers what’s really discipling us. Bonnie Kristian argues that the biblical vision for the institutions that form us is renewal, not replacement—even when they fail us. Mike Cosper examines what fuels political fervor around Donald Trump and assesses the ways people have understood and misunderstood the movement. Harvest Prude reports on how partisan distrust has turned the electoral process into a minefield and how those on the frontlines—election officials and volunteers—are motivated by their faith as they work. Read about Christian renewal in intellectual spaces and the “yearners”—those who find themselves in the borderlands between faith and disbelief. And find out how God is moving among his kingdom in Europe, as well as what our advice columnists say about budget-conscious fellowship meals, a kid in Sunday school who hits, and a dating app dilemma.

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