My Notes: Black Liberation Theology was very popular in the 1960's. We often engaged in many debates concerning the role of the black church in the liberation struggle. James Cone and others, played a fundamental role in shaping these debates. As everyone remember's, President Obama was criticized for attending one of the sermons where Rev. Wright preached about racism in American Society. Rev. Wright was a disciple of James Cone. The Information below was taken from Wikipedia. Read with caution.
Black Liberation
Theology
James Hal Cone (1938–2018) was an American theologian, best known for his advocacy of black theology and black liberation theology. His 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power provided a new way to comprehensively define the
distinctiveness of theology in the black church. His message was that
Black Power, defined as black people asserting the humanity that white
supremacy denied, was the gospel in America. Jesus came to liberate the
oppressed, advocating the same thing as Black Power. He argued that white
American churches preached a gospel based on white supremacy, antithetical to
the gospel of Jesus. Cone's work was influential from the time of the book's
publication, and his work remains influential today. His work has been both
used and critiqued inside and outside the African American theological
community. He was the Charles Augustus
Briggs Distinguished
Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological
Seminaryuntil his death.[16]
Cone was born on August 5, 1938, in Fordyce, Arkansas, and grew up in the racially segregated town
of Bearden,
Arkansas. He and his family attended Macedonia African
Methodist Episcopal Church. He attended Shorter College (1954–1956),
a small AME Church junior college, before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree from Philander Smith
College in 1958, where he was mentored by James and Alice
Boyack. In his 2018 memoir Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody, Cone
wrote that they were the first whites he met who respected his humanity. Although
he had decided against parish ministry, their advice led him to obtain a Bachelor of Divinity degree
from Garrett–Evangelical
Theological Seminary in 1961, and Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees
from Northwestern
University in 1963 and 1965, respectively. He was shocked to
learn that most northern whites would not treat him with respect like the
Boyacks. Yet he was excited to learn of unfamiliar theologians, controversies
and biblical study methodologies. At the urging of and with support from the
white theologian William
Hordern at Garrett he applied and gained acceptance into the
doctoral program in theology.
He taught theology and religion at Philander Smith
College, Adrian College,
and beginning in 1970 at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he was awarded the
distinguished Charles A. Briggs Chair in systematic theology in
1977. In 2018, he was elected as a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Cone and his wife, Rose Hampton, married in 1958 and divorced in
1977. They had two sons, Michael and Charles, and two daughters, Krystal and Robyn.
In 1979, Cone married Sondra Gibson, who died in 1983. He died on April 28,
2018.
Theology
Hermeneutics
Cone wrote, "Exodus, prophets and Jesus—these three—defined
the meaning of liberation in black theology." The hermeneutic, or
interpretive lens, for James Cone's theology starts with the experience
of African Americans, and the theological
questions he brings from his own life. He incorporates the powerful role of
the black church in his life, as well as
racism experienced by African Americans. For Cone, the theologians he studied
in graduate school did not provide meaningful answers to his questions. This
disparity became more apparent when he was teaching theology at Philander Smith
College in Little Rock, Arkansas. Cone writes, "What
could Karl Barth possibly
mean for black students who had come from the cotton fields of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi,
seeking to change the structure of their lives in a society that had defined
black as non-being?"
Cone's theology also received significant inspiration from a
frustration with the black struggle for civil rights; he felt that black
Christians in North America should not follow the "white Church", on
the grounds that it was a willing part of the system that had oppressed black
people. Accordingly, his theology was heavily influenced by Malcolm X and
the Black Power movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was also an
important influence; Cone describes King as a liberation theologian before the
phrase existed. Cone wrote, "I was on a mission to transform self-loathing
Negro Christians into black-loving revolutionary disciples of the Black
Christ." Nevertheless, "The black church, despite its failures, gives
black people a sense of worth."
Methodology[
His methodology for answering the questions raised by the
African-American experience is a return to scripture,
and particularly to the liberative elements such as the Exodus-Sinai tradition,
prophets and the life and teaching of Jesus. However, scripture
is not the only source that shapes his theology. In response to criticism from
other black theologians (including his brother, Cecil), Cone began to make
greater use of resources native to the African-American Christian community for
his theological work, including slave spirituals,
the blues,
and the writings of prominent African-American thinkers such as David Walker, Henry McNeal Turner, and W. E. B.
Du Bois. His theology developed further in response to critiques by
black women, leading Cone to consider gender issues more prominently and foster
the development of womanist
theology, and also in dialogue with Marxist analysis
and the sociology of knowledge.
Contextual theology
Cone's thought, along with Paul Tillich,
stresses the idea that theology is not universal, but tied to specific
historical contexts; he thus critiques the Western tradition of abstract
theologizing by examining its social context. Cone formulates a
theology of liberation from within the context of the black experience of
oppression, interpreting the central kernel of the Gospels as Jesus'
identification with the poor and oppressed, the resurrection as the ultimate
act of liberation.
As part of his theological analysis, Cone argues for God's own
identification with "blackness":
The black theologian must reject any conception
of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all
peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their
experience becomes God's experience, or God is a God of racism. ...
The blackness of God means that God has made
the oppressed condition God's own condition. This is the essence of the
biblical revelation. By electing Israelite slaves as the people of God and by
becoming the Oppressed One in Jesus Christ, the human race is made to
understand that God is known where human beings experience humiliation and
suffering. ... Liberation is not an afterthought, but the very essence of
divine activity.
Despite his associations with the Black Power movement, however,
Cone was not entirely focused on ethnicity: "Being black in America has
little to do with skin color. Being black means that your heart, your soul,
your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are."
In 1977, Cone wrote, with a still more universal vision:
I think the time has come for black
theologians and black church people to move beyond a mere reaction to white
racism in America and begin to extend our vision of a new socially constructed
humanity in the whole inhabited world ... For humanity is whole, and
cannot be isolated into racial and national groups.
In his 1998 essay "White Theology Revisited", however,
he retains his earlier strong critique of the white church and white man for
ignoring or failing to address the problem of race.
Early influences
Cone credits his parents as being his most important early
influences. His father had only a sixth-grade education but filed a lawsuit
against the Bearden, Arkansas, school board despite threats on his life. White
professors of religion and philosophy, James and Alice Boyack at Philander
Smith College aided his belief in his own potential and deepened his interest
in theodicy and
black suffering. He found a mentor, advisor and influential teacher in Garrett
scholar William E. Hordern. Professor Philip Watson motivated him to intensive
remedial study of English composition. Classmate Lester B. Scherer was a great
help in this. Scherer volunteered to edit manuscripts of Cone's early books
while Cone's wife Rose typed them, yet Cone complained that neither understood
him. Cone wrote his doctoral thesis on Karl Barth. A 1965 breakfast
meeting with Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College
in Atlanta, convinced him that teaching and scholarship were his true calling.
The sociologist C. Eric Lincoln found publishers for his
early books (Black Theology and Black Power and A Black
Theology of Liberation) which sought to deconstruct mainstream Protestant
theologians such as Barth, Niebuhr and Tillich while seeking to draw on the
figures of the black church such as Richard Allen (founder in 1816 of the AME
Church), black abolitionists ministers Henry Highland Garnet, Daniel Payne, and
Henry McNeil Turner ("God is a Negro") and Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James
Baldwin, and other figures of the black power and black arts movement.
Womanist theologians, such as Delores Williams,
have critiqued Cone for both male-centered language and for not including the
experiences of black women in his sources. Williams, in 1993, acknowledged in a
footnote in her book Sisters in the Wilderness, that Cone has
modified exclusive language for the reprinting of his works and acknowledged
the issues with the previous language. However, she argues that he still does
not use the experiences of African American women in his method, and therefore
still needs to deal with the sexism of his work.
Other scholarly
critiques
Other critiques of Cone's theological positions have focused on
the need to rely more heavily on sources reflecting black experience in
general, on Cone's lack of emphasis on reconciliation within the context of
liberation, and on his ideas of God and theodicy. Charles
H. Long and other founding members of the Society for the Study of Black
Religion were critics of Cone's work. Long rejected black
theology contending that theology was a western invention alien to black
experience. Others objected to his endorsement of Black Power, lack of interest
in reconciliation and concern with scoring academic points.
Political commentary and controversy
Aspects of Cone's theology and words for some people have been
the subject of controversy in the political context of the 2008 US presidential campaign as Jeremiah Wright,
at that time pastor of then-candidate Barack Obama,
noted that he had been inspired by Cone's theology.
Some scholars of black theology noted that controversial quotes
by Wright may not necessarily represent black theology. Cone responded to these
alleged controversial comments by noting that he was generally writing about
historic white churches and denominations that did nothing to oppose slavery
and segregation rather than any white individual.
Hoover Institute fellow Stanley Kurtz,
in a political commentary in National Review,
wrote:
Cone defines it as "complete emancipation
of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem
necessary." For Cone, the deeply racist structure of American society
leaves blacks with no alternative but radical transformation or social
withdrawal. So-called Christianity, as commonly practiced in the United States,
is actually the racist Antichrist. "Theologically," Cone affirms,
"Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man 'the
devil.'" The false Christianity of the white-devil oppressor must be
replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and
oppressed.
Educator[
After receiving his doctorate, Cone taught theology and religion
at Philander Smith College and Adrian College. At the urging of his mentor, C.
Eric Lincoln, Union Theological Seminary in New York City hired his as
assistant professor in 1969. He remained there until his death in 2018 rising
to assume an endowed full professorship. Cone made significant contributions to
theological education in America. Prior to Cone's arrival in 1969, Union
Theological Seminary had not accepted a black student into its doctoral program
since its founding in 1836. During his career these, Cone supervised over 40
black doctoral students. These included Dwight Hopkins and some of the founders
of womanist theology Delores Williams, Jacquelyn Grant,
and Kelly Brown Douglas. He
delivered countless lectures at other universities and conferences.
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