Dr William Edgar
Speaker and Author
Rapping the Gospel
Overview
One of the oldest missiological questions we can ask is, how to contextualize the message without compromising its truth and its power? Rap was born in the streets of New York. It’s full of self-assertion and anger. Think of the names of the artists: Public Enemy, Ice T... What does this have to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ? Isn’t hip hop culture simply the “world?” Aren’t rap artists just anarchists we need to address with the opposite message of God’s love? Some rap is indeed anarchistic. But there is a surprising variety within this genre, and so it is unfair to make such a broad generalization. Besides, a closer look reveals analogies with the gospel. If we look for ways to contextualize the gospel message into the hip hop world, we will find them, sometimes in surprising sources.
Outline
1. How does the gospel rap?
1.1 Defining the hip hop culture
1.2 Worldview and missions issues
2. The trickster personality in rap
2.1 From survival to creative reemergence
2.2 Being “bad”
2.3 Railroad Bill
2.4 The good subversive
2.5 Jesus, the truly good subversive
2.6 Jesus the story-telling “bad” guy
3. The truth about the blues and rap
3.1 Inventing Robert Johnson
3.2 Stagolee shot Billy
3.3 Jim Crow and Shakespeare
3.4 Imitation for redemption
3.5 Theodicy in the blues
3.6 Hip-hop and protest
3.7 Toasting the story
3.8 The Word is “tricky”
4. Good theology and good rap
4.1 Jesus loves us so
4.2 Rapping on our way to heaven
Suggested Reading
Cecil Brown: Stagolee Shot Billy, Cambridge: Harvarde university Press, 2003
Sylvia R. Frey & Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998
Bruce Jackson, “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim like Me” : Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974
W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003
Anthony B. Pinn: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology, New York: Continuum, 1995
Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993
© Dr William Edgar 2005
