Saturday, November 07, 2009

An Overview of "The Decline of African-American Theology"

This year at The Gospel Coalition conference, I had the privilege of doing an overview of The Decline of African-American Theology: From Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity. In the talk, I tried to accomplish four things:

1. Provide a brief biblical basis for writing a book like The Decline, a book that critically examines the theological positions of professing Christians writers and theologians. We briefly looked at Colossians 2 for support.

2. Provide an overview of the book's methodology and limitations.

3. Give a general overview of the African-American theological starting point as characterized by writers in the 1750s to early 1800s, who were largely Calvinistic, then work through historical turning points in the theological history.

4. And a few thoughts on the way forward: including correcting the revisionist history and bad theology out there, a call for more writers contributing to this field, recover the Bible to make it functionally central in the African-American church, recovering a high view of God and the recovery of the gospel, and recovering the purity and centrality of the local church as "the colony of God left here to beam out the gospel and to organize its life around the gospel".

Take a listen and let me know what you think.


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