Heirlooms and Accessories
In our African American Liberation Theology pod, we chose to name our group Heirlooms and Accessories (as Ryan described in our first post here). As a group of 6 white people studying Black Theology, we wanted to begin from a place of honesty; to say “Yes, we have been benefitted from systems and theologies of oppression, and we are grieved by this truth.” We came each week to hear from de-centering voices of African American Theology that hold in tension the truths of trauma alongside the truths of God.
James Cones, J. Kameron Carter, Karen Baker-Fletcher, J. Deotis Roberts, and Cheryl A Kirk-Duggan taught us of the history, struggle, and voice of Black Liberation Theology. In addition, we read several chapters from Bessel Van der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps the Score. We partnered these readings of theology with readings of trauma studies in an attempt to expand our capacity to hold both simultaneously.
There is a large discrepancy in what the teachings of white, andocentric, western churches (and theology) teach/believe, and what is experienced, needed, and understood in groups of people that have been pushed to the edges of society. This is implicit in the writings of African American Liberation theologians, specifically in the views surrounding eschatology and how hope is urgently needed in the present more so than a future spiritual life. Black Theology is about the deep need and ability for African American people to reclaim their spirituality, voice, identity, body — here in the present.
It seems our conversation often came around to the topics of eschatology and community. It is our belief in the end of the story that ought to inform our present. Writers like Cone and Roberts emphasized that body-less future eschatology has no place for people who are experiencing hell in their bodies today. What we believe for the future must impact how we live today and this impacts our community. We aren’t saved for the sake of our own salvation, and as Cone puts it, “one’s future cannot be separated from the future of one’s community.”
As we sat around the table and weekly grappled with the tension of trauma and theology, we came to recognize that the two are inseparable. Studies in both trauma and theology show us that we humans need each other and God too desperately to go unimpacted by one another. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we do not go unaffected by our neighbors oppression. What we choose to do with this reality is our choice.
