Bradley Liberating Black Theology

The Bible and the Black Experience in America
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2355-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

When the beliefs of Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, assumed the spotlight during the 2008 presidential campaign, the influence of black liberation theology became hotly debated not just within theological circles but across cultural lines. How many of today's African-American congregations-and how many Americans in general-have been shaped by its view of blacks as perpetual victims of white oppression? In this interdisciplinary, biblical critique of the black experience in America, Anthony Bradley introduces audiences to black liberation theology and its spiritual and social impact. He starts with James Cone's proposition that the 'victim' mind-set is inherent within black consciousness. Bradley then explores how such biblical misinterpretation has historically hindered black churches in addressing the diverse issues of their communities and prevented adherents from experiencing the freedoms of the gospel. Yet Liberating Black Theology does more than consider the ramifications of this belief system; it suggests an alternate approach to the black experience that can truly liberate all Christ-followers.

 Anthony B. Bradley (PhD, Westminster Theological Seminary) is associate professor of religious studies at the King's College in New York City, where he serves as the director of the Center for the Study of Human Flourishing and chair of the Religious and Theological Studies program. He also serves as a research fellow for the Acton Institute. He has also published cultural commentary in a variety of periodicals and lives in New York City.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bradley, Anthony B.

Leseproben

2

America the Broken:
Cone’s Sociopolitical Ethical
Context

In the late 1960s, when Dr. James Cone’s powerful books burst onto the scene, the term “black liberation theology”began to be used. I do not in any way disagree with Dr.Cone, nor do I in any way diminish the inimitable and incomparable contributions that he has made and that he continues to make to the field of theology. Jim, incidentally, is a personal friend of mine.1

REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT

The prophetic theology of the black church during the days of segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, and the separate-but-equal fantasy was a theology of liberation.2

REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT

When the first images of Jeremiah Wright’s seemingly angry preaching against whites was broadcast on Fox News, most Americans were wondering, Why would he say such things about America? It seems so unchristian and unpatriotic. To understand this, as one of my professors used to quip, “Context is our friend.” This chapter will introduce in more detail some of the contextual issues that serve as the basis for the sorts of objections that liberationists like Jeremiah Wright and James Cone have against America, white people, and what is called “the white church.”

In recent decades, the social gospel movement, liberation theology, and secular political theory have filled a void by addressing social issues left largely untouched by conservative Christian scholarship. James Cone developed black theology in the late 1960s out of a frustration that at no point in his seminary or PhD studies, at predominantly white schools, was there any discussion about racism and segregation in America. While completing a Bachelor of Divinity program at Garrett Biblical Institute (now Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary), his frustration turned into what may seem like bitter anger. His experience of encountering racism among United Methodists at Garrett, along with his professors’ refusal to see “racism as a theological problem,” prompted Cone to attempt to make these theological connections on his own.3 For Cone, it seemed that despite studying during the height of the civil rights movement, the central problems being addressed in American theology were issues important only in the European context.

After completing his PhD at Northwestern University, Cone published Black Theology and Black Power in 1969 as an attempt to bring theology into close contact with the social issues blacks were experiencing in America in the late 1960s. Immediately after publication, the book launched a movement that continues to shape and form the theological positions of many seminaries around the world. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the foundations of Cone’s black liberation theology as a system and to introduce the theological trajectory fashioned by the first generation of black liberation theologians.

CONE’S THEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND

James Cone’s early theological texts are highly dependent on the theology of Karl Barth. This is likely a result of his PhD dissertation, “The Doctrine of Man in the Theology of Karl Barth.” In general, Cone’s perspective, which can be easily placed within the twentieth-century liberal and neoorthodox Protestant traditions, is primarily derived from philosophers and theologians such as Immanuel Kant, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albert Ritschl, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and other neoorthodox theologians.

Cone, in seeking to develop something unique for the black experience, was eager to develop a theology that went beyond nineteenth-century liberalism and neo-orthodoxy and often clearly states his departure from each tradition at key points, dealing with issues specific to the black community. Cone, orienting much of his theology on the work of men such as Jean-Paul Sartre, works out the implications of his belief in the autonomy of black consciousness by stressing the fact that human existence precedes essence.

Other than a few book reviews, no detailed theological critique has been made of Cone’s work from an evangelical perspective that addresses in an interdisciplinary fashion black theology at the time of his writing and in the years following his initial work. Such a critique will be the focus of the chapters to follow. The goal of this chapter is to consider Cone with as much charity and grace as possible because Cone’s deepest desire was to help black people address the mystery of white oppression and racism that engulfed much of our world at the time of his early writings.

CONE’S THEOLOGICAL STARTING POINTS

James Cone, in his book A Black Theology of Liberation, develops black theology as a system, beginning by articulating liberation as the starting point and content of theology.4 Many of these initial formulations serve as the background for later developments of black theology as a theological system.5 According to Cone, Christian theology is a theology of liberation—a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ.6 The authoritative existential situation described in the study of the being of God is correlated to the black experience in America. Black consciousness and the black experience of oppression orient Cone’s system around the principle of the self-sufficient inwardness of the human consciousness in general and the black consciousness in particular—i.e., one of victimization from oppression.7

One of the tasks of black theology, says Cone, is to analyze the nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ in light of the experience of oppressed blacks. As such, they will see the gospel as inseparable from their humiliated condition, which bestows on them the necessary power to break the chains of oppression. For Cone, no theology is Christian theology unless it arises from oppressed communities and interprets Jesus’ work as that of liberation. Christian theology is understood in terms of systemic and structural relationships between two main groups: victims (the oppressed) and victimizers (oppressors). In Cone’s context, writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the great event of Christ’s liberation was freeing African-Americans from the centuries-old tyranny of white racism and white oppression.

Cone grounds the liberation motif in the biblical story of redemption by noting that: (1) God chose Israel because they were being oppressed; (2) the rise of Old Testament prophecy is due primarily to the lack of social justice as God is revealed as the God of liberation for the oppressed; and (3) Jesus reaffirms the preeminence of God as liberator because Jesus locates his ministry among the poor and the oppressed (Luke 4:18–19).8 Theology, then, is the study of God’s liberating activity on behalf of those who are oppressed. Assisting the oppressed, in Cone’s view, is the sole reason for the existence of theology as a discipline.

American “white theology,” which Cone never clearly defines, is charged with having failed to help blacks in the struggle for liberation. Black theology exists because “white religionists” failed to relate the gospel of Jesus to the pain of being black in a white racist society.9 According to Cone, black theology is legitimate as a theological system primarily because it arose out of a concept of oppression, which is the predominant condition of God’s people; and secondly, it is Christ-centered. Jesus, as ultimate liberator, is the only means of freeing blacks from white oppression.

Cone seeks to distinguish his system in contradistinction from “conservatives” because in the fight against evil there is no perfect guide, including the Bible, for discerning God’s movement in the world. In the Conian system, the Bible is a “valuable symbol for pointing to God’s revelation in Jesus, but it is not self-interpreting.”10 The burden is on humans to make decisions without a guaranteed ethical guide. Cone appeals to Paul Tillich’s view of Scripture, which orients the role and function of theological reflection about God. Since God cannot be described directly, symbols are used to point to dimensions of reality that cannot be spoken of literally. The Tillichian understanding of symbols does not only mean that blacks suffer as victims in a racist society but that “blackness” is an ontological symbol and a visible reality that most accurately represents what oppression means in America.

Since white Americans do not have the ability to recognize the humanity in persons of color, blacks need their own theology to affirm their identity in terms of a reality that is anti-black—blackness stands for all victims of white oppression. “White theology,” when formed in isolation from the black experience, becomes a theology of white oppressors, serving as divine sanction for criminal acts committed against blacks. Cone argues that even those white theologians who try to connect theology to black suffering rarely utter a word that is relevant to the black experience in America. White theology is not Christian theology at all.11 There is but one guiding principle of black theology: an unqualified commitment to the black community as that community seeks to define its existence in light of God’s liberating work...