4 min read
Give Us Our Black Theologians Back
5/25/2026
There’s a certain ease that comes when you never have to separate Christianity from your own reflection.
When the heroes of the faith look like you, it’s easy to assume you naturally belong in the story. The theologians, reformers, missionaries, and church fathers feel like inherited family history instead of distant figures from someone else’s world.
However, when none of them look like you, the opposite happens. You quietly learn to associate holiness with distance from yourself. You begin to mistake cultural distance for spiritual maturity. And slowly, following Jesus can start to feel less like redemption and more like erasure.
Yes, we’re all called to deny ourselves.
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” - Matt 16:24
But God’s redemption always takes place in and through a cultural context—and it wasn’t just a white one.
In seminary, we study streams of Protestant Reformers in Europe. Men who courageously resisted corruption, fought for the authority of Scripture, and helped recover truths summarized in the five solas.
And praise God for them.
But our spiritual history isn’t just a white one. And when the black theologians get depicted as white in articles, paintings, and books, it says something—even if unintentional.
Augustine was African. His mother, Monica of Hippo, was an African woman whose persistent prayers Augustine himself credited as one of the means God used in his conversion. Read Confessions.
Yet this is the cover image many Christinas still associate with him has European features.
That matters…
- Athanasius of Alexandria (296–373), the North African Bishop, was reportedly called “the Black Dawrf” most likely due to his height and skin color. He fiercely defended the divinity of Christ against the Arian heresy.
- Tertullian (155-220), from Carthage in North Africa, helped shape the theological language Christians still use to speak about the Trinity today.
Why bring race and ethnicity into it at all?
Doesn’t that just divide Christians further?
Please hear your Black brothers and sisters when we answer this:
No.
It helps heal the divide that was already there.
Because when you grow up rarely seeing yourself in the story of the church, discovering that Black Christians helped carry, defend, shape, and preserve the faith does something deep in you.
It reminds you Christianity was never merely a European story. You were always in the family. History just forgot to mention it.
The gospel reached “the ends of the earth” quickly.
Acts 8 records an Ethiopian eunuch carrying the gospel back toward Africa. The inclusion of Gentiles shattered ethnic boundaries. The early church was already Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and European before many modern nations even existed.
A multi-colored picture of Christianity does not weaken the gospel.
It strengthens it.
Because the beauty of Christianity is not sameness.
It is reconciliation.
As a Black man sitting under teachers like Dr. Carl Ellis and Karen Ellis at Reformed Theological Seminary, something in me came alive. I heard stories I didn’t know my soul was thirsting for. We learned about early Black missionaries like George Liele and the faithfulness of what historians call the “Invisible Institution” — enslaved Black Christians who worshiped, prayed, preached, and clung to Jesus in hidden spaces while enduring horrors many of us can barely imagine.
Learning those stories did not diminish my unity with white Christians.
It strengthened it.
Because Christianity is not a white man’s religion.
And it is not a Black man’s religion either.
Christianity is the story of a Savior gathering people from every tribe, tongue, and nation into one family.
A unity that is beautiful in theory and difficult in practice.
Just read Ephesians 2.
“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility…” - Eph. 2:14-15
But when that dividing wall actually comes down, heaven itself rejoices.
Ephesians 3 says the church becomes a display of the manifold wisdom of God to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.
“His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms,” - Eph. 3:10
That means multicultural unity is not political window dressing.
It is spiritual witness.