| dc.description.abstract | The current study seeks to insert African American Pentecostal theologies as
a generative subject of examination for scholars of American and African Atlantic
religious history and theology. By providing close and critical readings of newly-found
sources of African American Pentecostal theology by four significant African
American Pentecostal theologians, this study situates African American Pentecostal
thought as a distinctive theological trajectory within both African Atlantic
Christianity and North American religious thought. The writings of theologians Ozro
Thurston Jones, Jr., Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, James Alexander Forbes, Jr., and
William Clair Turner, Jr., will be explored to expose the contours of a distinctive
African American Pentecostal theology. An examination of the writings of this
cohort demonstrates that African American Pentecostal thought is contextual
(marked by an openness to and engagement with various Christian and philosophical
traditions) and liberationist (deeply committed to a revitalization of Christian witness
in the pursuit of social justice). In this comparative analysis of their respective
theological programs, with a focus on recurring theological ideas, values, and
themes, this study provides a phenomenology of African American Pentecostal
theology.
Within the field of modern black theology, there has been a call by scholars
for more attention to be paid to pneumatology, which has been generally neglected;
while within the field of North American Pentecostalism, a glossocentric
pneumatology has been the dominant theological framework. The four theologians
examined in this study resist both limitations, and in the diversity of their methods
and theological perspectives, these scholars participate in a broader, more generous
theological enterprise. This project seeks to both unsettle and complexify anew
various reductionist readings of African American Pentecostal theologies and to
create space for a deepened exchange between the broader traditions of African
Atlantic Christian theologies and African American religious thought.
The methodologies employed in this study include biographical criticism,
phenomenological analysis, and religious ethnography. Biographical criticism
underscores the critical importance of social contexts in the formation of black
religious consciousness. Phenomenological analysis allows for an examination of
African American Pentecostalism as its own distinctive religious phenomenon. And
critical religious ethnography is employed to assess the reception and impact of each
theologian’s overall theological production. Given the growth and theological
maturation of Pentecostalism, and the social, cultural and ecumenical impact it has
exerted worldwide, this dissertation examines what the theology of the African
American Pentecostal movement has contributed to contemporary Christian
thought amidst the shifting theological contours of World Christianity and North
American religious thought. | en |
