You do not need a degree to understand theology or to do it well. Theology is the work of thinking carefully and in order about what Scripture says about God, and the history of Black Christianity in America shows ordinary believers doing that work with real rigor. The assumption that serious theology lives only in academic rooms is recent, narrow, and contradicted by people like Charles Octavius Boothe, a formerly enslaved pastor who wrote a systematic theology for sharecroppers.
That is the answer. The more useful question is why so many believers, Black believers especially, have absorbed the opposite idea, and what Boothe’s story corrects about it.
Where does the idea that theology belongs to scholars come from?
The claim usually sounds humble. Theology is for people with the training, the languages, the shelves of books. Everyone else receives the conclusions. Underneath that humility sits a historical assumption: that the important theological work in America was done by credentialed people in established institutions, and that those institutions are where it is still done.
For Black Christians, that assumption carries extra weight. If the books on the seminary shelf were almost all written by white scholars, the quiet lesson is that Black believers were mostly recipients of theology rather than producers of it. Dr. Walter Strickland, a theology professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, says he regularly meets people wondering where Black voices were in the historical Christian story in America. His answer is direct: “African Americans, black folk have been Christians.” More than that, he argues, they contributed to the construction and development of theology itself.
So why does it feel otherwise? Strickland’s explanation is not that the work was missing. African Americans were often discriminated against in the presses, so much of what Black Christians produced went by the wayside. The absence on the shelf is a publishing history, not an intellectual one. A reader who mistakes the first for the second will conclude that people like them were never meant to think hard about God.
Strickland’s own route to Boothe shows how deep the gap ran. While he was working on his dissertation, someone asked if he had heard of Charles Octavius Boothe. He had not, and he says that is the answer nearly anyone gives. No one could tell him where to find Boothe’s book. When a copy finally reached him, it came as a Word document passed along informally, from someone unsure who even held the copyright. A full theological work by a Black Baptist leader had become hard to find, not because it lacked substance, but because no one had kept it in circulation.
Who was Charles Octavius Boothe?
Very little is known. Strickland says almost everything on record comes from a few autobiographical pages at the start of Boothe’s encyclopedia of Black Baptist churches in Alabama. What follows is Strickland’s summary of that record.
Boothe was born into slavery in 1845. Teachers staying on the plantation taught him to read at night, using a tin plate with letters etched into it. He later worked for a judge, a job that required reading, and much of the legal reasoning of that era drew on Scripture, including the writings of Paul. Reading the Bible to do his work, Boothe came to saving faith in Christ shortly before emancipation.
After emancipation he gave himself to equipping what he called plain people. Strickland credits him with founding Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. later pastored and where the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, and with being a founding father of Selma University. He worked with Booker T. Washington, helped originate the Colored Baptists of Alabama, and built bridges between that body and the Southern Baptists of Alabama. He also did justice work on behalf of people laboring under unjust conditions. Frustrated by the slow pace of change, he moved to Detroit during the Great Migration and died there in 1924. No one knows where he is buried.
Boothe was a pastor, a church founder, an educator and a bridge builder, and he wrote theology in the middle of all of it. He did not keep his theology and his justice work in separate compartments. Lisa Fields observed that his example shows “a high view of scripture does push you to fight for injustices if looked at properly.” Strickland agreed, adding that Boothe did not set the Bible aside to go do something else. Scripture moved him to act and gave him direction for how to act, which is why Strickland describes Boothe’s systematic account as “a methodological resource as well for fighting injustice.” Theology imagined as purely academic seems detached from ordinary life. Boothe’s was written for sharecroppers and carried into the struggles they faced.
Was his theology actually serious?
This is the heart of the correction. If Boothe had written something simple and devotional, his story would prove only that ordinary people can be sincere. The claim is stronger. Plain Theology for Plain People is a systematic theology, an orderly account of the Christian faith, written for the rural pastors and lay people Boothe trained as he traveled through Alabama.
It was aimed at sharecroppers, people with an elementary school education. Yet Strickland, who republished the original text without altering it, says the reading level is striking: “he’s writing to people who graduated high school.” Boothe did not water things down for plain people. He expected a great deal from them. Strickland estimates that 15 to 20 percent of the book is Scripture itself, which gives its teaching a worshipful quality.
Lisa Fields drew out the implication. To write a book like this, she said, “he had to have a high view of the importance of orthodoxy.” Strickland agreed and located that conviction in Boothe’s view of the Bible, which he calls “the sort of fountain from which the theology arose.” The word plain describes the audience and the clarity, not the depth.
How did Boothe’s method differ from academic theology?
Strickland compares Boothe with the kind of systematic theology many evangelical seminaries use today, naming Wayne Grudem as an example. In that style the theologian gathers verses, feeds them into a kind of machine, and the doctrine comes out the other end. It is orderly and didactic, but mechanical.
Boothe worked from below rather than from above. In Strickland’s words, “He’s going to the biblical text and sort of allowing it to emerge, these doctrines to emerge organically out of that interaction with the text itself.” Rather than collecting proof texts for a system already in place, Boothe read the text and let the doctrine take shape from the reading.
His treatment of eschatology, the doctrine of last things, shows the difference. It is shorter than a modern reader might expect, with none of the charts of dates and sequences common in some evangelical textbooks. Boothe asks bigger questions about the kingdom and about what awaits the individual, questions Strickland says were “shaped not by what you would typically find in the Academy, but really through his lived experience.” On Christology, the doctrine of Christ, Boothe tries to get inside the gospel story rather than stand back and analyze it from a distance. Strickland says you can almost feel him wrestling with the systematic form, wanting an orderly account while also wanting to enter the biblical story and ask what it meant for Black life in the 1890s.
Boothe did not position himself in the theological camps of his day. Strickland says he was not concerned with covenant theology, dispensational theology, or how Reformed someone’s thinking was: “He’s concerned about the Bible and representing the Bible well in an organized manner.” His approach is “allowing his theology not to be beholden to a system, but it’s beholden to the text.”
That reverses the usual gatekeeping. The insider vocabulary that makes theology feel closed to outsiders, the camps and labels, was not Boothe’s test of good theology. Faithfulness to the text was. A reader who lacks the vocabulary is not shut out of that test. They are invited into it.
Doesn’t this prove too much?
There is a fair objection here, and it cuts in two directions.
First, Boothe may have been exceptional, so his life sets no pattern for anyone else. Strickland does call him extraordinarily gifted. But consider what Boothe lacked: formal schooling, a library, legal freedom for much of his early life. Whatever made him a theologian, it was not access to the academy. The point is not that everyone will write a systematic theology. The point is that the barrier was never the credential.
Second, and more important, Boothe cannot be turned into an argument against scholarship. Strickland is a seminary professor who spent his own training recovering this book. And Boothe himself was informed by the academic works of his time, Strickland notes, while “he’s still being faithful to answer the questions of the plain people to whom he was writing.” Boothe did not reject learning. He refused to let learning set the questions in place of Scripture and the people he served.
It also matters whose tradition is being described. Strickland speaks of a gift that the African American Christian tradition, especially in the 1800s, offers through someone like Boothe. That is a claim about a particular stream and period, not a statement that every Black Christian reads Scripture one way. Black churches have been diverse in theology and practice, and Boothe’s own life included close work with white Southern Baptists. His example belongs to everyone, and Strickland says white evangelicals in particular would do well to read him and hear God described in fully orthodox terms with a vocabulary they are not used to.
The honest conclusion is narrower and better than anyone can do theology, so training does not matter. Training is a gift. It is not a gate.
What does Scripture say about who can understand God?
The New Testament offers a striking parallel. When the council in Jerusalem questioned Peter and John, Luke records their reaction: “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). In older English, unlearned and ignorant does not mean foolish. The phrase is commonly understood to mean they lacked the formal religious training the leaders expected. Luke is describing what surprised the council, not commanding anyone to avoid study. But the surprise is telling. The authorities assumed the right to speak about God came from schooling. The apostles’ authority came from Jesus and from Scripture rightly understood.
Boothe fits that pattern. He came to faith reading the Bible for a job, and he spent his life helping others read it in order.
Why the forgotten book still matters
The publishing history and the theology belong together. A man who expected sharecroppers to follow an orderly, Scripture-saturated account of the faith was later nearly erased from the record that teaches believers who counts as a theologian. When his book vanished, so did the evidence against the assumption that theology belongs to scholars. Recovering it does more than honor one man. It restores a witness that ordinary believers, thinking hard about God from the text, have always been part of how the church does theology.
Boothe did not live to see any of that. He died discouraged, far from the places he built, and Strickland observes that he had no idea what his efforts would become: Selma University still stands, and Dexter Avenue became the center of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Strickland reaches for Paul here, and the KJV puts it this way: “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:9). Paul is urging churches to persist in doing good, not promising visible results on a schedule. Boothe never saw his harvest, and his book sat unread for generations. Both came back anyway, and the book now asks of its readers what it asked of sharecroppers: not a credential, but the willingness to take Scripture seriously enough to think in order about God.