Review: Black church history incomplete

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 (UPI) -- More than three decades after Martin Luther King's assassination, the general ignorance of the history, range and power of the black church is an egregious educational and social dilemma.

This is why this reviewer, who covered King and the civil rights movement in the early 1960s as a foreign correspondent, eagerly grabbed the "Fortress Introduction to Black Church History," (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 184 pages, $15) by Anne H. Pinn, an African Methodist Episcopal pastor, and Anthony B. Pinn, a religious studies professor.

The authors swiftly guide their readers through the maze of black denominations and their origins.

They enrich their narratives with timelines, brief biographies of the major players in the African-American story of faith, and bibliographies that are helpful for further studies of this fascinating topic.

Finally the uninitiated learns to distinguish between the A.M.E., The A.M.E. Zion, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, for example. Now he has a road map for the labyrinth of black Baptist denominations.

He also learns the suffering, hardships and obstacles in spite of which -- or perhaps because of which -- Christianity is so deeply rooted within the black community, whose enslaved ancestors more often than not were pagans or Muslims.

All this information one must gratefully acknowledge before proceeding to this little volume's multitude of deficiencies.

To begin with, before getting to the good stuff one has to swallow some indigestible assertions. There is this repeated reference to the misdeeds of the "Europeans."

What Europeans? The Russians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, Greeks, Swedes, Hungarians, Germans, Luxembourgers, Swiss? This reminds this writer of a seminary in Chicago where a guest lecturer averred, "All Europeans have God in their heads, and all Africans have God in their hearts."

When a European -- that is: a student actually hailing from Europe -- asked, perhaps a little facetiously, what this statement said about the God in Mother Theresa's head and the God in Idi Amin's heart, he was labeled a racist.

Of course he wasn't. It's just that generalizations about "Europeans" are as wrong and inadmissible as generalizations about Africans. In the present case, the authors almost lost this European on page 2.

It didn't help that by sweepingly condemning the varied populations of an entire continent, the Pinns forgot to mention some nasty Africans: those chiefs who sold their people into slavery -- and those Muslims who enslaved blacks way back in the 7th century, well before America was even discovered.

This is where good editors would have been useful. They might have pointed out to the authors that a more elegant use of language and consideration of facts might have attracted infinitely more readers to some of the fascinating material that lies buried in the belly of this book.

But then the editors must have been out to lunch. How can the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which prides itself with its people's biblical literacy, allow the following booboo to slip past?

"Joseph Washington, a scholar of black church history, drew upon biblical imagery from the Book of Genesis to make this point: 'In the beginning was the black church, and the black church was with the black community, and the black church was the black community.'"

This quote should be the most important sentence in the entire book. Alas, it loses much of its poignancy because the Pinns pegged it on the wrong Testament. Washington paraphrased of course not Genesis but the prologue to the Gospel of John, the Bible's key statement about the nature of Christ.

This is an unfortunate glitch because it undermines the book's credibility in the eyes of Christians who should read it. Even more unfortunate is an inexplicable omission, however.

Imagine writing a history of Eastern Orthodoxy without mentioning the beauty of its liturgy. Imagine writing about Roman Catholicism, leaving out the glory of its Cathedrals, paintings, and the Gregorian chant.

Imagine writing about European Protestantism without a chapter on the Lutheran chorale, Bach cantatas or the Reformed hymnody of Louis Bourgeois. You'd leave out what the church of any persuasion is all about -- worship.

Yet such an omission is precisely what Pinn and Pinn have committed in the present volume, and this must be mentioned here because it reflects a general malady.

The black churches' arguably greatest contribution to the world's culture -- a contribution on the level with Bach or Chartres Cathedral -- is being made light of with annoying consistency all too often even by blacks themselves: the beauty of Gospel music and its magnificent child, jazz.

Sadly, the lament about the Pinns' incomplete endeavor does not end there. The book ends with a chapter of Liberation Theology. Its last sentence reads,

"This black theology called all Christians to join in the struggle for social transformation through the destruction of power structures that run contrary to the call of Jesus Christ for justice and equality."

The authors were careful not to identify with that kind of thought. Tragically, though, they do not address what the Right Rev. George Dallas McKinney, a bishop of the Church of God in Christ, a huge African-American denomination, once called the paramount need of black and white Christians in the U.S. alike -- their reconciliation.

Liberation theology is a moribund enterprise because it addresses finite problems. What is needed instead is a genuine theological, e.g., God-centered, approach the fruits of which alone can bring racial harmony.

John F. Johnson, pastor of Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Washington, a predominantly black congregation, wrote this for Martin Luther King Day as he was pondering the postmodern confusion plaguing the Western world:

"Confused and aimless people are in no condition to reach out and grow in harmony with other races and people groups. Each race, mired in its own stupor, must rely on subjective generalizations in regards to one another -- generalizations that exist based on distrust, blame and envy.

"This is our current dilemma in America ... These generalizations don't allow for true understanding or communication.

"Since African Americans figured out post modernity before everyone else, maybe we can likewise be the ones who again humble ourselves and heed the call of Jesus Christ so that God might hear us and heal our land.

"God has plenty of room for all who are open to his one, absolute, objective truth found in the Bible. Only in Jesus Christ will mankind's races find the ability to share respect, peace, and harmony."