Year after year our awareness of the historical evidence increases that “Big God Theology” is indigenous to African American leadership from the beginnings of the Christian conversion of Blacks on this continent. Again and again what we find is that the most vivid and horrible descriptions of the slave trade go hand in hand with unshakeable confidence in God’s sovereignty over and in it all.
I would dare to venture that it was precisely the steel certainty of God’s all-governing, all-wise sovereignty, in the furnace of untold suffering, that forged the spiritual treasures of what Carl Ellis calls the “theological soul dynamic” in Black culture. In the last fifty years the biblical character of that soul dynamic has been significantly compromised by the widespread embrace of (largely white!) liberal theology.
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