The choice between conservative and progressive Christianity is younger than the faith it claims to divide. Dr. Vince Bantu, who teaches church history and Black church studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, argues that the split took its modern shape in the 19th century, first in white European academic theology and then in white American theology. For most of Christian history, and for the Black church across its life in America, a commitment to the truth of the gospel and a commitment to justice were one commitment. So you do not have to pick a camp. The position beyond them is the older one they each broke in half.
That is a historical claim, and it can be tested like one. If Bantu is right, three things should be visible. The two packages should appear late. The earlier church should show the two commitments held together. And communities outside the Western academy should have kept them joined.
What are the two options supposed to be?
Bantu describes both camps by their defaults. Since the 19th century, he says, evangelical Christianity has meant a commitment to spiritual truth, with social justice not necessarily a high priority. Mainline or progressive Christianity, from the same century, runs the other way. In his words, “There’s a commitment to human flourishing, but there’s not necessarily a commitment to absolute truth.” He is describing the default setting of each tradition, not every person inside it.
He knows both from the inside, as a student and later as a professor in conservative evangelical and mainline liberal seminaries alike. In the evangelical schools he heard real commitment to the authority of Scripture, alongside distrust of justice and reconciliation, which got dismissed as cultural Marxism or liberalism, and outright racism. In the mainline schools, where Black faculty and students were easier to find, he discovered that many professors who knew the Bible thoroughly did not believe it. He says he felt caught between “two worlds, neither one of which really I felt reflected where I came from.” If neither camp matches the church that formed him, the obvious question is which of them is actually old.
How the divide was built
Bantu’s sequence runs in three steps, and he gives centuries rather than dates or documents. The first is European Enlightenment thinking, especially in Germany, which he believes still drives much mainline liberal theology. The second is 19th-century academic theology, where Christians came to be sorted into liberal and conservative, evangelical and mainline. He calls that sorting “really a white European first, and then white American imposition academic kind of interjection into Christian discourse that is very foreign to the very nature of Christianity and even Christian history.” The third step is the American institutional form of the split: evangelical and mainline schools that, in his account, each carried one half of the inheritance. He adds that racism has been at the core of evangelical theology since its 19th-century beginnings, and that evangelicalism was embedded in American empire from the start.
A fourth step comes later and is easy to miss. Bantu argues that much 20th-century Black theology did not draw on the Black church at all. Its theologians, he says, took European thinkers such as Schleiermacher and Barth and placed the word Black in front of their ideas. The result, in his judgment, sounds like nothing in any Black pulpit, which is why many Black churchgoers have never heard of these theologians.
Readers should notice what this sequence leaves unsaid. The transcript names no particular 19th-century faculty, controversy or text where the sorting happened. Bantu says his book’s introduction and his own chapter lay out the case, and those are where the evidence for each step would have to be checked.
The claim also needs some precision. Bantu is not saying Christians agreed about everything before 1800. Disagreement is as old as the church. His point concerns the shape of this particular disagreement: one package that keeps truth while loosening justice, and one that keeps justice while loosening truth. At almost any earlier point in church history, he argues, it would have been “almost foreign to come in and say, I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe in justice.” It would have been just as strange to call yourself a Christian while doubting the Bible or holding that Jesus is one way among several. He calls that second move “a very modern and western concept,” and says that before the 19th century it was not even a European Christian way to think.
The dates also expose a backward accusation. When concern for the oppressed gets labeled cultural Marxism, the label assumes the concern came from Marx. Bantu points out that Christians were on the front lines of justice work long before Marx appeared in the 19th century. A later thinker cannot be the source of an earlier practice.
What the church looked like before the split
Bantu’s specialty is patristics, the study of the early church. His chapter in The Gospel Haymanot, a book of essays by Black scholars, takes its title, “Undivided Wings,” from a fourth-century witness. Ephrem the Syrian, as Bantu describes him, was a Middle Eastern theologian who wrote in Syriac and taught theology through musical, interactive poetry suited to his own culture. Bantu gives Ephrem’s line this way: “truth and love are undivided wings. They are wings that cannot be separated because truth without love cannot take off and love without truth cannot soar.”
On Ephrem’s terms, a one-winged bird never gets off the ground at all, which makes the modern camps two attempts to fly with half of what flight requires. Bantu’s chapter traces the same understanding through the early church more broadly. Ephrem is his clearest voice for something he says early Christians took for granted: a relationship with Jesus could not be separated from relationships with one another and the call to shalom.
Early African Christianity supplies a second line of evidence, and it answers one of the strongest progressive objections. Many mainline thinkers, Bantu says, treat any claim that one thing is true and others false as a product of imperial theology. He answers from the record: “early African Christians have been arguing for one universal truth, even when they were the ones being persecuted for it.”
The argument turns on who held power when. If exclusive truth claims were simply a weapon of empire, you would expect them mainly among Christians who had power. Bantu points instead to Christians who held them under persecution. He does grant that Christianity has had domineering forms, and between Ephrem and the modern academy he names several: Constantinian, Carolingian and colonial. But he calls them an aberration from the gospel rather than its true face, and argues that a gospel holding truth and justice together has always existed alongside them. That is his bridge across the centuries, and it is a sketch rather than a detailed history.
Where the Black church fits
For Bantu, African American Christianity is one of the clearest later witnesses to that older faith. He reads the earliest African American authors as committed Christians who fought slavery and then Jim Crow, and he names writers such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass as sources that held firmly to both the gospel and liberation. On his reading, the Black church across roughly 400 years in America kept together what the Western academy was pulling apart.
The Exodus story is the thread he follows. From abolition through the civil rights movement to the present, the Black church has sung and preached Moses’ demand to Pharaoh. Bantu asks readers to hear the whole sentence. Exodus 8:1 in the King James Version reads, “Let my people go, that they may serve me.” The service here is owed to God, and other translations render it “that they may worship me.” Bantu notes that the purpose clause comes back each time Moses repeats the demand throughout Exodus. The freedom God demands is freedom for something. His summary: “So liberation of the oppressed is unto the worship of Jesus Christ.” In theological shorthand, “Orthopraxy is not divorced from orthodoxy.”
He grounds the refusal to rank the two in the words of Jesus. Asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus names love for God with all the heart, soul and mind, then adds in Matthew 22:39, “And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Bantu reads “like unto it” as ruling out a priority of one over the other. You cannot do the first without the second, he says, and the reverse holds too. A tradition that keeps the first commandment and treats the second as optional has not kept the first as Jesus gave it.
Isn’t the conservative side simply the biblical side?
This is the strongest objection. If the conservative camp defends the authority of Scripture and the uniqueness of Christ, leaving it can look like leaving the truth, and calling the camps a 19th-century construction might seem like a clever way around biblical authority.
Bantu does not take that way around. He holds the convictions the conservative camp claims to defend, calling the Bible the word of God and Jesus the only way, and he credits the evangelical schools he attended with affirming Scripture’s authority. His complaint is that the package cut loose what the Bible joins, on terms shaped by its own history.
He applies the same test to the other side, with unusually concrete evidence. He grants that Black theology, liberation theology and womanist theology contain “a lot of good stuff” and offer helpful critiques of conservative evangelicalism. But he observes that “most black theology, if you look at their footnotes, they’re mainly quoting German and white American theologians from the 19th and 20th century.” A movement attacking white supremacy, in other words, built its case from white European sources while passing over African and African American sources that held to both the gospel and liberation. If the footnotes bear that out, neither camp is the Black church’s ancestor. Both arrived from somewhere else.
Two limits keep this honest. These are Bantu’s historical judgments, and they deserve to be tested against the sources he cites. His reading of whole eras as imperial aberrations is an interpretation other historians would frame differently. And a camp’s default is not every member’s conviction. Plenty of evangelicals have worked for justice, and plenty of mainline believers hold firmly to Christ. Bantu himself says he wants gracious conversation with liberationist and womanist scholars. His history describes the structure of the options, not the hearts of the people inside them.
Why the history matters now
Bantu believes the gap between the academy and the pews has become a crisis. He estimates that roughly nine in ten Black PhDs in Bible or theology would not affirm that Jesus is the only way and that the Bible is the word of God, while most Black Christians, pastors and churches affirm both. He offers this as his own estimate from inside the field, not a published survey. If the gap is anywhere near that size, the scholars who define Black theology in print may not share the faith of the churches they describe.
His alternative is not a retreat to white evangelicalism. The book’s title points elsewhere. Haymanot, he explains, is an ancient word used in East African languages, especially in Ethiopia and Eritrea, that can mean belief, doctrine or theology and also lifestyle or conduct. One word covering both what you believe and how you live reflects a church in which “there’s no separation between horizontal righteousness and vertical righteousness.” He adds that such words have been used to translate the Bible and write theology since the earliest centuries of the church, which makes them as old a theological vocabulary as the Greek and Latin terms seminaries treat as the refined ones.
When Lisa Fields asked how he kept his faith in schools that pressed him from both directions, Bantu said his “faith is not in evangelicalism or mainline or any denomination or any theological strand or school of thought.” His faith was in Jesus, and from there he took what was good from each strand and rejected the rest.
The history hands a reader two practical tests. When someone dismisses concern for the oppressed as cultural Marxism, ask which came first, the Christian practice or Marx. When someone calls belief in one universal truth a tool of empire, ask who was holding that belief while being persecuted, and then check whose names fill the footnotes. Neither test settles every argument. Both show that the two boxes on offer were built recently, and that the faith Ephrem wrote about and the Black church sang never had to fit inside either one.