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The Religion & Culture Web Forum

January 2004

"Black Theology: The Notion of Culture Revisited"

by Dwight N. Hopkins (University of Chicago)

This month, Professor Dwight Hopkins of the University of Chicago Divinity School discusses the relationship between culture and theology. Laying out parameters for the discussion of culture, he argues for the particular importance of such a discussion to black theology.

In this presentation, looking at the framework of human labor, the artistic, and spirituality, we [advance] the position that the notion of culture must be taken seriously due to its fundamental presuppositional status in the varieties of black theology in South Africa and the United States, as well as in other global regions….[Culture relates] to an ultimate vision or concern upon which matters of life and death are decided. A qualitative vision or concern transcends the individual self or communal selves, consequently the spiritual trait appears. And culture is not pristine, neutral, romantic, or statically given. It operates in a flow that is animated by the spirit (for Christians, God’s spirit) in contention with adverse spirits (i.e., that which harms life and systematizes a monopolization of God’s creation by one group).

Culture is where the sacred reveals itself. As a result, one only knows what she or he is created to be and called to do through the human-created realm of culture. On our own, we are limited to this realm. If we could enter the divine realm by using human efforts, there would be no need for the divine; indeed, such a human capability would restrict divine power to ultimately determine the definition of what it means to be a full human being. Because humans cannot create the divine realm, the ultimate vision or the divine spirit must impinge upon and enter the human condition.

Read Professor Hopkins's full essay.

Early in January, an invited response to Professor Hopkins's essay will be offered by James A. Noel of the San Francisco Theological Seminary. Invited responses may be viewed on the forum's public discussion board, where we also invite the wider readership to post their own thoughts and reflections. The commentary will run through the month of January, after which it will continue to be accessible through the Web Forum archive.

The Martin Marty Center's Religion and Culture Web Forum is an online forum for thought-provoking discussion on the relationship of scholarship in religion to culture and public life. Each month the Marty Center, the research arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, invites a scholar of religion to comment on his or her own research in a way that "opens out" to themes, problems, and events in world cultures and contemporary life. Scholars from diverse fields of study are invited to offer responses to these commentaries on the forum's discussion board, where the public is also encouraged to post thoughts and reactions to commentaries and invited responses.

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