Duppy Conqueror, by Robert Beckford (My Theology series)

Author: Robert Beckford. Review by Frank Regan

Robert Beckford is a black theologian and broadcaster. His theological project is to rethink liberation theologies for second and third generation black British people. ‘How can people racialised as black conceive God, Jesus, and the Spirit within our social and political worlds?’ he asks. Can theology – talking about God – confront racial injustice, social inequality and environmental degradation?

Beckford takes his inspiration from the ‘emancipation/defiance tradition of African Caribbean Christianity’. Colonial Christianity was dishonest. It taught a distorted version of the gospel to conform it to racial capitalism (slavery) and racial terror (race and sexual violence).

Beckford’s reflection is fundamentally trinitarian. He begins with God the father, who in Jamaican language is God of rahtid. The word means ‘wrath’. The God of western theological discourse is personal, impassible, transcendent, immanent, omnipotent and so on. When that God arrived in Jamaica 500 years ago, so did racial terror. That God did not fit in with the reality of Jamaican slave society. And so, enslaved people ‘reimagined God as anti-slavery, anti-imperial and anti-racist. God became the God of black struggle, full of rage and “rahtid”’. God suffers with people, feeling and raging against injustice. Beckford ends this section by quoting the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann: ‘a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved… the one who cannot suffer cannot love either.’

The writer moves on to ‘Jesus as Dread’. The Dread Jesus is the one who in Jamaica is saviour but who in Britain is the emancipator, calling people to confront racial capitalism and racial terror as it is lived and experienced in Britain.

Beckford reminds us that all Christology begins with Jesus’ question: ‘Who do you say I am?’ The Christ of our white, establishmentarian churches is not the Christ of the black African or Caribbean. He may be the same historical Jesus, but his words fall on different ears. His life, his gospel, is read from the margins, from the lower rung of the economic ladder.

Dread is a symbol which points to a style, a culture and a statement. Dread is anti-colonial, as when Jesus drives the devils into the swine (Roman cohort). Dread is upliftment, with all that can mean for men and for women. Dread is empowerment. It is the power to change, to protest and disrupt, to suffer injustice, to channel anger and to heal.

Finally, our author dubs the Holy Spirit ‘Dup’. In Jamaica a dup is a supernatural spirit that roams the whole universe. Duppy tales served to preserve identity, and made political commentary on power relationships.

Beckford’s theology is rooted in the local, but it moves to the ‘diasporean and outernational’. To read him is to glimpse an experience of God through a lens quite unlike that of our Society’s white majority.

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