The Gospel in the African-American Experience
God's story is our story.by Paul Grant
February is Black History Month, as anyone in the North American university world can testify. The point of Black History Month is to provide a historiographical correction – that is, to address errors in how we tell history.
Black History Month focuses on the untold stories of Africa and the African Diaspora, typically with heavy emphasis on slavery in the American South, and the Civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. So far so good; who can argue with that?
There are two problems; two obstacles to Black History Month’s success. The first is contemporary society’s individualism. Our orientation to the self is so absolute, that we live in a dream world, imagining that we have no relationship to the past. We cannot bear the thought of connection to those who went before us; lest we bear some kind of responsibility for the blessings we’ve been given.
Racial history makes it more difficult, because we’ve inherited more than good things from the past. We’ve also inherited the ongoing consequences of our forebears’ sins. We’re reluctant to talk about their sin, because we don’t want to be responsible for addressing the problem. Our individualism keeps us from seeing any connection between history and present. This individualism is an obstacle to Black History Month’s success.
Whites face an additional obstacle in our cultural enrichment: the stunting of our imagination by the racial dynamics in our society. We’ve been subtly trained in a two-toned world – black and white – and there’s not a whole lot we can learn from each other. In the spirit of tolerance, we go along with Black History Month as an opportunity for minorities to have the floor, as it were. (Never mind that most historically-themed events this month in the university world take place on majority culture terms and for majority culture digestion.)
From this perspective, we go to Black History Month events, not to learn anything, but to show support for our friends, who wish to take their turn at the mic.
God’s History is Our History
But the Bible teaches a different approach. All history is part of God’s general revelation, affording us opportunities to learn about God through other people. That is not to say that God endorses everything that has happened. Far from it! Rather, God is nearby throughout history.
Consider the biography of Abraham, as recorded in Genesis. Half of Abraham’s activities are despicable, if not downright evil. What kind of a man treats a woman like Abraham did Hagar, impregnating her and turning her out into the desert? Certainly no one a shortlist for sainthood. This was no model of perfection. But God worked in his life, and Abraham trusted him. God loved Abraham no thanks to any merit of Abraham’s.
Abraham is our spiritual father, because he trusted God. That’s it. But as Christians today, we are part of God’s promise to Abraham. God said, I’ll give you as many descendents as the stars in the sky, and we are today part of God’s promise to a man who lived a very long time ago.
Our lives are not our own, and are not autonomous. And just as we belong to Abraham, because we’re his children, so we also belong to all the other Christians with whom we share the earth. Their stories are more than their own. Ultimately, all church history is God’s history, and is part of our own history. Through the witness of other Christians, we learn more about the character of God.
Since the gospel is so central to black history, Black History Month is more than an opportunity to hear other people’s stories; it is an opportunity to hear the story of the Holy Spirit, working in the world. It is an opportunity to hear our own story, and to learn who we are, and what’s in our souls.
This is not to say that Black History Month doesn’t have useless elements. Ideology-based historical revisionism seems to burble to the surface this time each year, whether in the form the outrageous: “every human innovation in the last 40,000 years comes from Africa”; the offensive: “Brain capacity is related to skin pigmentation”; or the heretical: “Christianity is merely a variant on African religions, so let’s purify our religion by worshiping those Gods”.
But we can be smart. Black history is big enough that we don’t have to let just any fool in the door. Instead, we have a duty to sift God’s story out from all the nonsense, and hear what God may be telling us though the testimony of his church.
- How did slaves hear the truth of a righteous God between the lines of that perverted form of the Gospel that was sold to them?
- Why did some of the very first free blacks in the US choose to hold loosely that precious freedom they’d secured, opting instead to give their lives to proclaiming the good news to the world – to Native Americans, to slaves in the US and in the Caribbean, across the sea to Africans, and yes, even to white men in America?
- How did the black church navigate the twentieth-century schism in American Protestantism, between “liberals” and “fundamentalists”?
The story of the gospel is central to the African experience in the new world, and what greater joy is there to here the old, old story of Jesus and his love, especially when it’s all fresh and new? African American church history is your assignment this month. Return to these pages in the coming days to find some resources.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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