ARTICLE Theodicy and Black Theological Anthropology in James Cone's Theological Identity (original) (raw)
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Decolonizing Blackness, Decolonizing Theology: On James Cone's Black Theology of Liberation 1
The CRL James Journal, 2021
James H. Cone is without question the most important Black Theologian of the last century in U.S. theology. This essay is an engagement with his work, focusing in particular on the shifts from European theology, in his Black Theology & Black Power, to Black Aesthetic Religious production, in The Spirituals & The Blues, to The Cross and the Lynching Tree. The core theme of this essay is the entanglement of spiritual/religious colonization with production/invention of racial hierarchies that then became the crucibles for the forging of racist imaginaries that entailed, authorized, enshrined, and sacralized white supremacy. The Janus face of this alchemy, however, was the production of a black religion of liberation that entailed decolonizing the “blackness” invented by the modern project of religious racist colonization. The essay considers how Cone’s works empowers us to think through the analogies between the process of the colonization of the indigenous peoples of the so-called “New World” and the “enslavement” of African peoples. The similarities have to do with the coupling of the colonization of imaginaries with the imposition of racial imaginaries, i.e. religious conquest is also a racial conquest, and conversely, racial conquest is also a religious conquest.
James Cone and the Crisis of American Theology
The objective of this essay is to investigate the public function of Christian theology in the (politico-theological writings and hermeneutics of James H. Cone. It is also to articulate a critique of white American theology. In Cone's work, Christian theology is expressed as a public discourse and testimony of God's continuing emancipa-tive movements and empowering presence in society with the goal (1) to set the oppressed and the vulnerable free, (2) to readjust the things of the world toward divine justice and peace, and (3) to bring healing and restoration to the places in which volitional (human) agents have inflicted pain, suffering, oppression, and all forms of evil. This essay is an attempt to imagine creatively with new hermeneuti-cal lenses and approaches-anti-imperial, liberative, and postcolonial-the task of Christian theology as public witness to carry out the emancipative agenda and reconciling mission (salvation, healing, hospitality, wholeness, reconciliation, and peace) of God in contemporary societies and in our postcolonial moments. The basic argument of this essay is twofold. First, it contends for the essential role of liberation theology as a public witness in redefining Christian theology in general. Rather than being a "special interest" or merely political theme in theology, it suggests that black liberation theology has a special role to play in "freeing" Christian theology from racism , oppression, and imperialism. Second, by promoting some new understanding of Cone's work and applying it in some new context, this article is deploying Cone's public theology to critique or awaken dominant white theology to a new way of thinking about the whole field of theology in the 21st century.
Cone’s binary view of Africanness and Christianity through the eyes of his African American critics
Missionalia, 2018
Unlike some of his American colleagues, James Cone tended to distance Black Theology from Africanness in general and African Traditional Religions in particular. Throughout his life this tendency has evolved, but never disappeared altogether. This article sets out to achieve three goals. First, I give a historical account of Cone’s relationship with Africa, particularly with African religiosity, focusing on the criticism he received from his colleagues in the U.S. (notably Gayraud Wilmore, Cecil Cone and Charles Long). Second, I analyse the tension between the Christian and the African in Cone’s theological outlook by probing his notion of indigenization/Africanization among others. Third, I seek to interpret Cone’s binary view of Christianity and Africanness in the light of his chief locus of enunciation, namely Western Christianity (albeit contested). My attempt here is to lay foundations for an engagement with Cone’s attitude toward Africanness from the current South African (decolonial) perspective by considering it, first, within its original African American context.
James Cone's hermeneutic of language and black theology
Theological Studies, 2000
The author looks at the emergence of Black theology as a liberation movement by focusing on the way in which James Cone developed a hermeneutic of language that fostered such an emergence. Black Americans elaborated a theology around Jesus the Christ whom they experienced as God's expression of solidarity to humanity, especially Black humanity. The author explains how Cone's calling God/Christ Black expresses a true metaphor and then discusses Black historical experience as narrative and the theological meaning of Black hope. Finally, she raises six foundational questions for the future of Black theology.]
Black Theology: An International Journal, 2010
In this essay, I posit that the original way in which the concept, heuristic, and signifier "liberation" functioned in U.S. Black Liberation Theology has by both form and content been un/consciously resignified into a discourse of cultural legitimation. The signifier "liberation" has become decontextualized (politically, economically, and culturally) in the second and third iterations of U.S. Black Liberation Theology, causing the discourse to become perpetually oriented towards past, not present or future, alternative dreams of social transformation and sites of strudle informed by the Black Christian radical tradition. In order to accomplish such work, this article employs a postcolonial perspective to the sources and discursive strategies within U.S. Black Liberation Theology. The second section ofthe article examines the historical and social processes involved in the slippage between liberation and legitimation, probing key moments and issues of class difference that led to (1) the disengagement of U.S. Black Liberation Theology with the cries ofthe living poor and marginalized and (2) the development of evasive discursive strategies within U.S. Black Theology that render Black Liberation Theology into a middle-class theology.
In this essay, I posit that the original way in which the concept, heuristic, and signifier ‘liberation’ functioned in U.S. Black liberation theology have by both form and content been un/consciously resignified into a discourse of cultural legitimation. The signifier ‘liberation’ has become decontextualized (politically, economically, and culturally) in the second and third iterations of U.S. black liberation theology, causing the discourse to become perpetually oriented towards past, not present or future alternative dreams of social transformation and sites of struggle informed by the black Christian radical tradition. In order to accomplish such work, this article employs a postcolonial perspective to the sources and discursive strategies within U.S. black liberation theology. The second section of the article examines the historical and social processes involved in the slippage between liberation and legitimation, probing key moments and issues of class difference that led to (1) the disengagement of U.S. black liberation theology with the cries of the living poor and marginalized and (2) evasive discursive strategies within U.S. black theology that turn black liberation theology into a middle class theology.