Abstract
When Jurgen Moltmann calls for an eschatological faith that does not flee the world but struggles to bring the world into conformity with the new future of God, black Christians know what he is talking about. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a better example anywhere of that combination of profound trust in the eschatological promises of God with concrete application to the political and economic realities of this world that characterizes the black churches in America. Perhaps it has something to do with roots in African thinking that includes the
unwillingness to adopt rigid time distinctions between the past, present and future found in conventional western thinking.1 Both past and future are drawn into the present in a way that makes it quite impossible to keep future reality from having its impact on the present in practical ways. As a result the projection of eschatological hopes into an indefinite future, so common in white piety, could not become predominant in the Black Church. When black people sang, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” they were expressing not only a profound religious experience, they were referring to escape northward. “When the black slave sang, ‘I looked over Jordan and what did I see, Coming for to carry me home,’ they were looking over the Ohio River.”22