Crafting the Prophetic Voice

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. did not initiate black prophetic preaching; he was, rather, initiated into it. Rev. Kenyatta Gilbert’s A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights is a theological origin story about the distinctive rhetorical tradition that is black prophetic preaching.

The text begins by naming the social crisis of the Great Migration—shorthand for a massive demographic shift of 1.5 million African Americans from the South to the North between 1916 to 1940—as an essential context for understanding black prophetic preaching. This tradition of Christian proclamation—which Gilbert calls “exodus preaching”—is framed in the context of black pastors seeking to respond theologically to the pressures of injustice, prejudice, and segregation that black migrant workers navigated in Northern urban communities in the inter-war period. Of special note, Gilbert surfaces the social gospel tradition of African-American clerics who, unlike white social gospel leaders Walter Rauschenbusch, Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden, and others, demonstrated a desire to not only build institutional churches that confronted industrial evils but also to address systemic issues of lynching, police brutality, and so on.

While the entire book makes an important contribution to the study and practice of preaching, the third chapter, in particular, sparkles with insight. Within it, Gilbert marshals a solid cast of intellectuals—including Paulo Freire and Zora Neale Hurston—to land on a four-part definition of prophetic preaching. He contends that prophetic preaching unmasks systemic evil, remains hopeful in difficult situations, aids listeners in naming their own reality, and displays a will to adorn. The criterion of adornment—with patient attention to aesthetic categories of beauty, vision, and desire—is some of the most creative theological writing, in any genre, that you are likely to read. On a practical level, the definition provides a yardstick against which working preachers and homiletics faculty can assess the strength of contemporary pulpit work.

To flesh out this theory of prophetic preaching, Florence Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and Reverdy Ransom function as exemplary pastor-prophets within and among African Americans during the period between World War I and World War II. Gilbert accomplishes a deft task of historical reconstruction, making Revs. Randolph, Powell, and Ransom understandable within their era without implying that every preacher within that era embodied the kind of sophisticated approach to preaching that he commends.

Theologically, divine intentionality and interminable hope are twin refrains throughout the book. What emerges from this account is the idea that God’s desire for creation is to experience a flowering life of justice, compassion, and the holistic peace that scripture names as shalom. Frequently, perhaps far too frequently, prophetic preaching is envisioned as social critique that identifies injustice convincingly. Gilbert’s achievement is to highlight the importance of hope—and the well-crafted language which nurtures such hope—as an essential corrective to the cynicism that surrounds certain forms of contemporary prophetic preaching.

Gilbert’s text could be strengthened by making an explicit case for God’s goodness and power in view of the strange careers of Jim Crow and racialized industrial capitalism confronting black lives during the inter-war period. In fairness, his insistence on divine intentionality and the text’s juxtaposition of hope and the unmasking of systemic evil implies a recognition that the social crisis of the Great Migration occasions a need for trusting in the goodness and reliability of God’s character. Still, questions remain: What are the grounds, for instance, for believing that God has the power to accomplish what God intends? Gilbert, as is clear from the argumentative force of Pursued Justice, is able to answer, but he does not offer a sustained argument on the matter.

This concern notwithstanding, Gilbert’s text merits a wide readership in classrooms and congregations. In both form and content, Pursued Justice is a breakthrough work of practical theology and rhetorical analysis. If audience reception follows quality of content, it deservedly will enjoy multiple rounds of printing and critical acclaim.