The Unknown Theologian
Charles Octavius Boothe.
You may have never heard his name. Until four years ago, I hadn’t.
I was struggling to stay awake in day two of an eight-hour church history class when my professor mentioned him. At the time, all he could only offer us was a photo of Boothe. With the fuzzy, black and white picture in the background, my professor explained how our knowledge of church history was limited because many of its documents, like Boothe's systematic theological handbook, had been lost.
My heart bounced back in forth as I looked at Boothe's photo. I was proud that an African American man, who was born a slave, had accomplished writing a systematic theology with limited access to education and resources. Yet I was angry that his theological reflections about God, humanity, salvation, the church, and last days weren’t available for me to read.
I felt seen and excluded—seen because my professor highlighted Boothe's story; excluded because unlike others in the room, I had yet to experience my faith through the lens of someone who looked like me.
BOUND TO THE BOOK
Charles Octavius Boothe (1845–1925) was born on June 13 in Mobile, Alabama, and was the legal property of Nathaniel Howard. His great-grandmother was born in West Africa before being captured and forced to live as a slave in Virginia. Boothe describes his grandfather as a "pure African."[i]
He cherished memories of his grandfather offering songs of worship to God, his grandmother's fervent prayers for those in need, and the Christian fellowship he experienced at a Baptist church, where "black and white people sat together to commune and wash each other's feet."[ii]
At the age of three, Boothe learned the alphabet on a tin-plate. By eight he was reading the Bible. Boothe's ability to read and write was an anomaly. But in God's providence—and despite the oppressive nature of slavery—he was enslaved on a plantation with many teachers. He writes in a brief autobiographical sketch,
The teachers who boarded here . . . became my instructors, and so I was soon reading and writing fairly well. Here, listening to the reading of the Bible, I was drawn toward it and began to read it for myself.
He goes on to speak of how the gospel story "bound" him to it "with cords," which nothing, not even the hardship of slavery, could break.[iii]
Boothe's ability to read and write saved him from being forced to endure the harsh labor of picking cotton in the sweltering heat. Instead, Boothe served as an “office boy” for an attorney, which allowed him to spend hours reading law books and the Bible (a primary source for legal practices in the mid-nineteenth century).
AN EXPERIENCE OF GRACE
Though Boothe had an affinity for the scriptures and professed "an experience of grace" that fixed him "on the side of the people of God," he didn't receive baptism until after gaining his freedom through the Emancipation Proclamation.[iv] In his work The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptist of Alabama, Boothe speaks of the transition from living as slaves to freemen and women, including the impact on life in the church. He writes,
The Negro was, by slavery, reduced to the minimum . . . He was not allowed to have any will of his own . . . His master's will was substituted for his, and out of his master's choice his words and deeds must proceed, even as concerned the most sacred relations of life. . . He was not allowed to have any conscience . . . Whatever the master said, the slave must do . . .
From this condition, we came forth into liberty, and with this eking existence of wilted life we must make a beginning as freemen . . . We had never felt or studied anything of the privileges and obligations which center in individual sovereignty. Though we were ignorant of the gospel for the most part and knew nothing of the order of business in church meetings, we found ourselves suddenly forced into the management of church affairs. We had now to look to our own heads for light, to our own hearts for courage, and to our own consciences for moral dictation.[v]
AN UPLIFTING LEGACY
Boothe would dedicate the next fifty years of his life to helping African Americans and their clergy navigate the waters of their newfound freedom. In 1868, he was ordained as a minister at St. Louis Street Church in Mobile. One year later he taught at the Freedmen's Bureau, which was a U.S. government-funded agency that provided shelter, clothing, food, and education to help lift newly freed men and women up out of the pit of slavery.
"Racial Uplift was Boothe's consuming passion," writes Walter Strickland.[vi] For years, Boothe taught in the public school system and played a "significant role in elevating literacy rates among black Southerners from 10 percent in 1860 to nearly 43 percent in 1890."[vii] He believed education was the key to dispelling the myths that blacks were no more than ignorant savages. He was also convinced that education was pivotal to the African American's ability to read and interpret Scripture. Only then would they be able to see themselves apart from the degrading interpretations of the Bible that were handed down to them by their slave owners.
In the early 1870s, Boothe helped found the Colored Baptist Missionary Convention for the State of Alabama (CBMCA), which was the first statewide African American denominational organization. In partnership with the Alabama Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Home Missionary Society, Boothe and the CBMCA founded Selma University to train African American pastors for the work of ministry in 1878.
In addition to teaching in the theological department at Selma, Boothe also hosted "ministerial institutes" throughout the South "to train black preachers and deacons in the rudiments of Christianity and church management."[viii]
REDISCOVERING BOOTHE
In 1890, Boothe put forth a simple yet robust theological treatise called A Plain Theology for Plain People to "help plain people in the study of the first principles of divine truth."[ix] For over a century, this gem of church history has been lost. But due to the persistence of Dr. Walter Strickland—Associate VP for Kingdom Diversity Initiatives and Assistant Professor of Systematic and Contextual Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary—Boothe’s “plain” book has resurfaced.
In 2017, one year after I first heard Boothe's name, Dr. Strickland, in partnership with Lexham Press, gifted this resource back to the church—and to me. As I read the first pages, I was captivated. It was immediately clear to me that Boothe was a man who had a deep and abiding faith. How else could he write things like,
When ignorant, a man is helpless, defenseless, he knows not what to do nor which way to go; and what knowledge can avail more to our security, peace, honor, and prosperity than that knowledge which acquaints us with the character of our Creator, Saviour, Preserver, and Judge . . . ?[x]
And,
The great truth that meets us at the beginning of our study of the divine nature is that God is not akin to matter, that he is not akin to those things which may be seen with the eyes, heard with the ears, and handled with hands. He is Mind, Spirit; not manifesting himself in weight, measure, figure, etc., but manifesting himself in qualities and activities, in powers, in knowledge, in wisdom, in disposition.[xi]
It was also clear to me that Boothe revered the Bible. Every theological conclusion he reaches has its foundations in the Word of God. In his discussion on the Trinity, instead of engaging in a philosophical debate, Boothe appeals to a collection of scriptures that treat God—the Father, Spirit, and Son—with "equal honor." He then writes,
No doctrine of the Christian faith is more plainly taught than that there are three persons in the Godhead. We cannot comprehend it, but we can accept it as the truth, and wonder, worship, and wait for the time in which we shall know as we are known.[xii]
A BRIGHT LIGHT FLASHING FORTH IN THE DARKNESS
A unique feature of Boothe's work is his tendency to immediately provide the implications of biblical truths, along with instructions on how to apply those truths to one’s life. In moving beyond merely teaching African American laypersons and ministers right orthodoxy in his theological handbook to also teaching them how to obey it, Boothe proved his heart for making disciples.
And though he never directly addresses the slavery and racism he daily endured, Boothe casts a vision as to how African Americans are to respond. He writes,
One of the familiar terms by which the Scriptures represent the condition of the worldly man is to say that they sit or walk in darkness . . . The Lord, however, puts his people in strong contrast with the men of the world. They are 'the light of the world' . . . They are the light, because they are enlightened by their Lord in order that they may shed light on the darkness of the world while he is withdrawn. It was his design in leaving them here in this dark and evil world, that they should be seen, like a bright light flashing forth on the darkness.[xiii]
The men and women who would first read these words were surrounded by darkness—the lynching of black bodies, poverty, and their lifelong enemy, racism. Yet into this historical context, Boothe calls African Americans to let their light shine forth before those who would seek to oppress them, so that they may glorify their Father in heaven.
FOUNDATIONS FOR A MOVEMENT
Boothe's appeal to our brothers and sisters to shine forth their light amid such darkness challenges me. I'm sure there were times when they wanted to lay aside their Christian witness and be led by anger, malice, and hate. I know I have been tempted to do it for much less than they endured. Yet, they persevered in faith, hope, and love.
Boothe and "his generation of black evangelicals put in place the institutions and values that nurtured the leaders of the [Civil Rights] movement that would one day batter down the walls of legal discrimination."[xiv]
More than twenty years after Boothe's death, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would move to Montgomery, Alabama and pastor Dexter Avenue Church—founded by Boothe in 1877. Dexter Avenue, which is now named King's Memorial Baptist Church, was the epicenter for galvanizing and organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
LASTING LESSONS
Now, more than a century after his death, Boothe still has something to offer the church as she navigates the darkness of a polarizing political climate, the continuous ripple effects of racism and slavery, and life in a secularized society.
But most importantly, his work calls us to meet people where they are when making disciples. Boothe didn't write his book to be known as the first African American to write a systematic theology book. He wrote it to meet the need of everyday Christians, who worked in the fields all day as sharecroppers and bi-vocational pastors and had "little time for books," but a "great need" for truth.[xv]
The need for truth is still great. May we all be so committed to Christ's life being formed in the hearts of others.
[i] Charles Octavius Boothe, The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama: Their Leaders and Their Works (Birmingham, AL: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895), 9.
[ii] Ibid, 9.
[iii] Ibid, 9.
[iv] Ibid, 10.
[v] Ibid, 237–9.
[vi] Walter Strickland preceded by the words by Charles Octavius Boothe, Plain Theology for Plain People (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017), viii.
[vii] Ibid, ix.
[viii] Edward R. Crowther, “Charles Octavius Boothe: An Alabama Apostle of ‘Uplift,’” The Journal of Negro History 78, no. 2,
[ix] Charles Octavius Boothe, Plain Theology for Plain People (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017), 3.
[x] Ibid, 4.
[xi] Ibid, 10.
[xii] Ibid, 21.
[xiii] Ibid, 85.
[xiv] Crowther, “An Alabama Apostle of ‘Uplift,’” 115.
[xv] Boothe, Plain Theology for Plain People, 3.
Yana Conner is a proud St. Louis native residing in Durham, NC. After fifteen years of full-time ministry in both the parachurch and church context, she still can’t get over the fact she gets to dedicate her life to making disciples. She recently graduated with a Master of Divinity in Christian Ministry from Southeastern Theological Seminary and serves as an Associate Campus Director at the Downtown Durham Campus of the Summit Church.
