Abstract
The 17th century arrival of Africans to what we now call the United States of America opened up a novel interpretation of Christianity in the “New World.” This slave hermeneutic fashioned a theological practice from which the liberation of African Americans would portend freedom for all of the earth’s oppressed. By seizing the initiative to appropriate the Bible for themselves, the slaves laid the historical foundation for today’s Black theology. Black theology’s contemporary religious lessons are grounded in the primordial convictions of ebony chattel.