Welcome, and thanks for reading. A slightly longer blog this week on a topic which both relates to a couple of discussions I’ve had recently, as well as somewhat to BlacK History Month. As ever, please do think of who you might forward it to. And if you receive it, why not think of subscribing?
Was St Augustine ‘Black’?
That is the impression given by such books as Ben Lindsay’s ‘We need to talk about Race’ (2019) and Esau McCaulley’s ‘Reading While Black’ (2020), as well as Thomas Oden’s more academic ‘How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind’ (2007). The intention of arguing for the ‘blackness’ of Augustine (as well as a host of other early Christian theologians such as Origen, Clement, Tertullian) is in large part apologetic – to counter the criticism of contemporary black people that Christianity is a ‘white man’s religion’, and that by celebrating the African origin of many of the formative early Christian thinkers it can be shown that the faith has impeccable ‘black’ roots. Oden’s focus is somewhat difference: to argue for theology to return to its roots in the theology of the early centuries, which often came from North African theologians, and thence politically to encourage black African Christians today to retrieve these sources, rather than use debilitating, post-Enlightenment western liberal theology. His aim is laudable, but he overplays connections between the early North African (but not ‘black’) theologians of the early centuries and black Christians with sub-Saharan roots of today.
Negatively, showing that Christianity is not ‘white’ is an important task. At a popular level, Lindsay rightly points out that both Jesus and biblical characters generally have often been portrayed as white (p 56) creating historical nonsense and theological distortion, and so justifying his ‘whitewashing’ project. But far too easily all the three books above slide from ‘not white’ to ‘black’, ignoring the fact that, projecting back our current colour labelling, scripture and early Christian history is about people of various shades of brown. All three engage in a sleight of hand where the meaning of ‘African’ elides into ‘black’. Thus Lindsay baldly and misleadingly states that Augustine was ‘a black African man’ (p 61); so too McCaulley makes a similar move with Tertullian and Augustine. He also makes much of Manasseh and Ephraim having an Egyptian mother, and so ‘African blood flows into Israel’, as if to suggest that in their short journeys between Canaan and Egypt Joseph’s brothers were crossing some sort of major continental and cultural frontier, rather staying in essentially the same milieu.
Highlighting the role of North African theologians clears away the misunderstanding that early Christianity was white, but they all lived, and they and their writings circulated around the Mediterranean basin that was the heart of the Roman Empire. That is, they looked north and east, but certainly not south across the Sahara. Lindsay and McCaulley’s strategy to commend the faith to their black peers in Britain and the USA is futile. The thinkers they highlight were in no way part of what Professor Paul Gilroy has termed the ‘Black Atlantic’ – the initially trading, though eventually also cultural nexus drawing together West and Central Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, and Europe, and that was given brutal birth through the slave trade. In no way was Augustine ethnically a precursor of that world. (In terms that speak to me, he probably would have looked like Mohammed Salah but not Sadio Mane. Ben Lindsay’s barber would have to adjust to cutting Augustine’s wavy, not tightly curled hair).
Central to the confusion is the meaning we attach to the word ‘black’. 1) At its most expansive and relying heavily on Marxist analysis, the word covers any ethnic group who are oppressed, thus the claim of Ken Livingstone and others that (from within that perspective) the Irish are ‘black’. 2) Somewhat more narrowly, it refers to peoples with dark skin who have experienced western colonial or economic dominance, including North Africans. 3) It refers to people with roots in sub-Saharan Africa with physical features such as tightly curled hair and very dark skin, and including those who were enslaved and taken across the Atlantic to the Americas. I assume that ‘BAME’ and ‘UKME/GMH’ refer to groups 2 and 3. I never know whether ‘people of colour’ refers to both groups, or 3 only.
As a footnote it may be worth adding that very recent DNA analysis of Egyptian mummies from the millennium or so before the birth of Jesus show that ‘Their ancestry appear to have been closer to that of modern Europeans than modern Egyptians, who show greater influence from sub-Saharan African populations’. A conclusion shared by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History at Tubingen (The Times, 29/09/2021).
Of course, the meaning of words is flexible and often depends on the context, but the debate over the past few years has focused on usage 3, and that is the context that Lindsay, McCaulley and (less centrally) Oden are addressing, so that extending the word ‘black’ to Mediterranean-facing theologians in North Africa simply causes confusion.
But this is not an abstract issue historiographical detail. Lindsay and McCaulley’s project is to speak into the black experience of oppression, poverty, hopelessness, and racial disparagement. It is an attempt to use history to heal the wounds of racism. It is, to quote the sub-title of McCaulley’s book, ‘an Exercise in Hope’. At the start of Black History Month, it may seem churlish or even oppressive to play down the claims that many major figures in scripture and church history were ‘black’. Such claims, I believe, are simply not true to history. I believe we can go on to better re-frame our understanding so that it foregrounds an authentic, not contrived and unreliable, place for black Christianity.
Before that, the project of making Augustine ‘black’ has several serious disadvantages.
1. It is unnecessary.
Over the past half century the strongest surge to world mission has come from Korean Christians. The most dramatic church growth has been in China. But rightly Korean and Chinese Christians have not uselessly searched to find their forbears in the pages of scripture or the annals of the early church. For them, as must be the case for people of all ethnic groups, their value is established through God’s promise to bless all peoples in Genesis 12:3, to be included in the eventual recipients of the good news in Matthew 28:19, to anticipate being gathered in worship around the Lamb of God in Revelation 7:9. By contrast, it would be trivial for them to claim that they too have a presence in scripture because of a purely verbal and shallow connection with Epenatus ‘the first convert in the province of Asia’ (Romans 16:5).
So too people of every ethnicity find their place in scripture and the historical outworking of God’s mission to all peoples. We don’t need to search. It is no problem for me that the English didn’t exist as a people until several centuries after the Bible was written, or the early church formed its theology. In fact, the first British figure to make a significant appearance was the widely refuted late 4th century theologian Pelagius. The attempts by British Israelites in the 19th and early 20th centuries to write ourselves into the Bible story as descended from the ten Lost Tribes of Israel is rightly derided as absurd.
Rather it falls to people of all cultures and ethnicities to write their Christian futures along with an appropriate theology and cultural identity to go with it. Thus Chloe Starr in her illuminating ‘Chinese Theology: Text and Context’ has described how the theology that has emerged from China reflects a cultural background quite different from that of the West.
World society and church owes much to what has come to us from black people. It is no accident that the most universal forms have popular music have reflected the experience of alienation and sense of exile that stems from the experience of enslaved peoples in the Americas. So too the delight in community, classically expressed in ubuntu – ‘I am because we are’, suffuses both black music and the understanding of church life. Giving expression to those roots (alongside the excision of deforming white western cultural models, such as the dress, mannerisms and expensive lifestyles of American evangelists) is a more appropriate challenge for black Christians than scrutinising history for past black exemplars.
2. It is demeaning.
This is perhaps the most damaging consequence of seeking to call Augustine and other early theologians ‘black’. It buys into an essentially white, western racialised understanding, where ethnic groups can be graded into a superior/inferior hierarchy, and so where groups have to seek to outbid each other in their claims to cultural significance. At worst, it implies the need for black people to have a bigger seat at the white man’s table. Not only, as we have seen, is that futile but it is an essentially wrong ambition. It denies the biblical understanding that all ethnic groups have intrinsic value, so that competition is not only unnecessary but worse still tempts us towards a vaunting pride in our ethnicity, which is contrary to that grace and love of God which underlies the Gen 12:3/Matt 228:19/Rev 7:9 trajectory, and which speaks of how God values and wills to bless every people.
All ethnic groups have their own distinctive geographical backgrounds and consequent histories. None have intrinsic superiority, but they have developed in particular contexts. The European location was especially favourable, with very long coastlines, abundant natural harbours, free-flowing and navigable rivers, and relatively few mountainous barriers; as well as a temperate climate. The result was that people, and then goods and ideas, could circulate with greater ease, and so development in western Europe accelerated.
But whilst different ethnic groups may have better geographical contexts to operate in, that does make some ethnic groups intrinsically better than others. It is demeaning for black people to approach history as though they have to compete with ethnic groups who have had more amenable environments or global impact. The traveller Ibn Battuta spoke of the peace and stability he encountered travelling through West Africa in the fourteenth century. The Benin bronzes speak not only of superb craftmanship but also an inner dignity and delight in the human.
3. It is paranoid.
‘Half the story ain’t never been told’ (Bob Marley ‘Get Up, Stand Up’). Distrust was an inevitable legacy of the powers of slave-owners to deceive and manipulate. The suspicion that Bob Marly sings of led to a belief that the Bible too was being used to deceive, and attention was often given to alternative ‘extra-biblical’ sources, such as the eighteenth century magical texts, the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. That carries on into the continuing belief that the white Christian tradition has suppressed the truth. Ben Lindsay begins his chapter ‘Disentangling Christianity from White Supremacy’ by arguing ‘Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the truth about the role of black people and our part in history has been eradicated, hidden, distorted and misinterpreted – whether that be in the education system or within institutions like the Church’ (p 55). As I have commented, his allegation that at a popular level ‘whiteness’ has been overplayed is right. But in terms of the historic role of black people, and despite his book’s long list of high-profile commendations, Lindsay’s chapter lacks serious historical evidence. As we have seen he transmutes ‘colour’ into ‘blackness’, but in terms of the nub of his discussion, which is clearly focused on people within the ‘Black Atlantic’ heritage, there is (as with English people) complete absence. This is not to say that no black Africans appear in scripture. For example, black Cushites from the middle Nile region, such as Moses’s wife (Numbers 12:1) and Ebed-Melech, who released Jeremiah from the cistern (38:7) make frequent appearances. J Daniel Hays in ‘From Every People and Nation: A biblical theology of race’ (2003) makes the important observation that earlier theologians misleadingly and racialistically projected on them the assumption that since they were black they must have been slaves (p 91). In fact they were important players in the Middle East at the time, but from a region clearly distinct from West Africa and the Congo Basin where the majority of slaves came from. In the New Testament black participation is seen in the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, and Simeon Niger (so presumably black) in Acts 13:1.
But overall, the claim that black people have been unfairly written out of the biblical narratives and the formation of the Christian faith in the first five centuries is simply false.
Believing falsehoods, and the sense of grievance and self-pity that can be engendered, is not a sure basis for Christian life and mission.
4. It can backfire.
When Holy Trinity church in Algiers was moved from the old city centre to a site in the suburbs next to the British Embassy, they retained some of the plaques from the old building. One of them honoured the Rev Pomfret Grey, who in the 18th century had been kidnapped by ‘Algerine pirates’ to work as a galley slave. When a ransom was raised for his release he refused it, like Moses ‘choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God’ (Hebrews 11:25, AV).
If Augustine was ‘black’ then so too were the Barbary Corsairs who kidnapped and enslaved over a million Europeans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to row in their galleys, and terrorising the coastlines of Europe with their sudden, predatory arrivals. Whilst not of the size or consequences of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, nonetheless it was a (North) African brutal crime against European bodies.
History shows us that as with people, so with ethnic groups: ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). Western Europeans are having to learn that hard lesson about our history; thus the howls of protest when the National Trust highlights the evil, enslaving brutality that has sourced their grand properties. But every ethnic group that turns over the stones of their own history will discover much to shock and revulse them.
Re-Framing the History: the Centre and the Margins.
In ‘On the Road with St Augustine’ James K A Smith describes Augustine’s discomfort, when after his conversion and becoming part of the elite circle around the powerful and impressive Bishop Ambrose of Milan, his mother Monica arrives from their home in Thagaste, North Africa. As Smith describes it: ‘Monica shows up with her “African” faith and backward customs that Ambrose had forbidden in his diocese. When she hears the bishop’s admonishment, she respectfully obeys his exhortation and finds other channels for her devotion” (p 111). The altering of what Smith calls Monica’s ‘ethnic’ expression of faith on arrival in a metropolitan setting is repeated innumerable times as Christian migrants come to our big cities. Justo Gonzalez says of Augustine’s youth: ‘The form of religion that his mother, Monica, was calling him to accept had clearly African overtones, and this was partly the reason why Augustine, a man versed in Greco-Roman letters and traditions, could not accept it’ (Smith, p 110, quoting Justo Gonzalez ‘The Mestizo Augustine: A Theologian between Two Cultures’.)
However, there came to be more movement than just the ‘provincial’ Augustine adjusting to metropolitan ways and faith. Gonzalez also notes that after Augustine’s return to North Africa, and the fall of Rome in 410 ‘he tried to read what had happened from a Christian perspective, he was quite critical of the entire Roman culture and civilisation, and this criticism was partly grounded on principles learned long before from his Berber mother’ (quoted in Smith p 233, n 11). We have, then, Augustine moving from the margins (North Africa) to the centre (Milan) and then back to the North African ‘margin’, where much of his greatest ministry and writing took place. It is the creativity of this dialectic between the margins and the centre, and the potential of ‘marginalised’ black contributions, rather than labelling Augustine as ‘black’, that is fruitful for Christianity today.
This is a constant theme of scripture, which raises up the value of the downtrodden. ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite’ (Is 57:15. John Goldingay writes that ‘contrite’ is better understood as ‘objectively crushed’, in ‘NIBC Isaiah’, p 323). Paul wrote ‘God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong’ (1 Cor 1:27).
God delights to work in unexpected ways, and from the margins. Both worldwide, and in the big cities of the West, it is amongst marginalised people that God is often seen to work most powerfully. The Ghanaian theologian, the late Kwame Bediako, described the growth of the church in Africa as the ‘surprise story’ of Christian mission. Mission theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expected growth amongst the spiritually developed cultures of India and China. Africa was not expected to have fertile mission potential. Yet in fact African, and more widely ‘black’ church growth, illustrates what Andrew Walls has called ‘the serial nature of Christian expansion’. In recent times that is where God’s Spirit has been seen to be powerful in drawing people to faith in Christ. Elsewhere in their books Lindsay, McCaulley and Oden celebrate the ways and warn of the hindrances for that to happen. By contrast, claims about the skin tones of early church theologians is not important.
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Video of the Week.
Robert Beckford ‘How a Racist Education produces a Racist Culture’, July 2020, uploaded by Open Church Network (20 mins). Articulate, original, specific, challenging.
Coming Events
Webinar on ‘Christianity, Climate and Race’ led by Rev Dr Israel Olofinjana, on Thursday 7th October 7.30-9.30pm; to be found at ‘eauk.it/climate-justice’.
Theos Annual Lecture: Reimagining Western Education in a Time of Racial Crisis, by Willie Jennings - 10th November at 7.30 on Zoom. Register with Theos. Jennings is the highly regarded Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale University, ordained Baptist minister and award-winning author. His lecture will explore the past, present and future of race in the Western world, proposing a new vision around which to imagine societies that promote equity, inclusion, and belonging.
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A black James Bond? If its Idris Elba, Yes! He is cool, tough, masculine, slightly sardonic. Further, since Bond is always something of a maverick and outsider (not that I have seen much of the genre), a black James Bond would play that up well.