During my theological sojourn at Dallas Seminary, Eddie B. Lane [1] challenged the author on several occasions to make a contribution to evangelical thinking modalities by learning to wed Christ-centered thinking with Afrocentric interpretative applications of the Sacred text. In other words, Lane rightly avers that it is important for African American theologians to exercise critical thinking as one who `engages the biblical text concomitant to one’s communal context in order to loose the mental shackles of Eurocentric interpretive application. It seems that the African American evangelical theologian can ill afford spending an inordinate amount of time investigating false truth claims and worldviews that are not prevalent among African Americans in order to be accepted or, even more tragically, revered by the dominant culture within Evangelicalism. Rather, one must take pains to contextualize the complexities of evangelical theology to the degree that one’s African American target group (believing and unbelieving) can readily understand and appropriate the truths therein. That is, one must employ the pedagogical principle of “teaching the unknown in light of the known,” if one desires to build the necessary bridges for engaging our brothers and sisters in search of truth.

It amazes the writer how much the spirit of postmodernism, even if not philosophically understood by many adherents, has laid its fiendish grip on the African American community as well. The writer observes this spirit flowing through the minds and motivations of African American brothers and sisters who have, in unprecedented numbers, begun to reject Big momma’s and paw-paw’s “Hope” found in the Christ of Scripture (1Tim 1:1; Heb 6:13-20), for what I deem as cultural hearsay—the crafting of philosophical and theological beliefs through street corner and barber shop conversations instead of historical research. Quite honestly, I, too, was once victimized by this shoddy intellectualism.

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