The Prophetic Persona of James Cone and the Rhetorical Theology of Black Theology (original) (raw)
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ARTICLE Theodicy and Black Theological Anthropology in James Cone's Theological Identity
Toronto Journal of Theology , 2019
This article's underlying objective is to reassess James H. Cone's theological vision and meaning, with a special interest in his theological anthropology, Christology, and his efforts to articulate cogently an adequate response to the crisis of black theodicy in the United States. Cone's theological identity is framed within the discourse of the greater African American intellectual (rad-ical) tradition, the Black Consciousness movement, as well as within the historical trajectories of the crisis of American white theology and the segregated white Church. While Cone's theological corpus is associated with the emergence of a constructive theology of emancipation in the Americas, his theological knowledge and political theology evoked the American democratic tradition and ideals. Cone insisted that African Americans should also be beneficiaries of the promises of democracy and the nation's future possibilities. Yet Cone, as a fierce critic of the American democracy and white supremacy, was not optimistic about the willingness of the American government to provide lib-erative political interventions to black theodicy and suffering; rather, he sought an alternative, one that is abstract and theoretical but experimental and psychological: the cross of Christ as a possible solution to the crisis of black theodicy. Hence, Cone could develop a Christology of appropriation to deal symbolically with the burden of black history of suffering and pain in relation to the historic suffering and agony of Jesus Christ. For Cone, the theological is implicated in the political and the cultural; while the political is not cathartic, the theological may provide a mental relief to black folk.
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.]
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.
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.
God is a Negro: The (Rhetorical) Black Theology of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner
Black Theology, 2015
In this essay, I argue that Henry McNeal Turner was doing something way more complex than just declaring ''God is a Negro'' when he uttered this iconic statement. It is my belief he was offering a deep theological analysis on God-talk, language and hermeneutics, in addition to providing a radical version of a contextual theology that predates our modern understanding of the term. In addition, Turner's editorial also offers a critique to the hegemonic Christian interpretation of his day, namely, asking African Americans to see and experience God in a new and affirming way. I have accomplished this task by offering a rhetorical analysis of this statement, arguing that Turner engaged in what some scholars call rhetorical theology. By maintaining that all theology is at its core a form of argument, ''rhetorical theology'' places emphasis on how a speaker or writer situates language in order to persuade its hearers to a certain position. In other words, when Turner spoke and wrote ''God is a Negro,'' he was not doing systematic theology, he was engaged in a public theology -a rhetorical enterprise, that had as its aim a persuasive function within a specific context.
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice, 2024
This chapter considers the history of Black liberation theology through the artistic and critical works of W. E. B. Du Bois and James Cone. Examining the “passion” stories of Du Bois in the 1920s and the academic studies of Cone in the 1970s, I explore how each turned to the figure of the Black Christ to reckon with anti- Black violence during the respective eras of lynching and mass incarceration. Both take part in a larger cultural lineage of African American religious thought and art, from the slave spirituals to Harlem Renaissance poetry (and beyond), in which Black intellectuals and artists have appropriated the Christian beliefs and practices of an oppressive society to reflect their own lived experiences and condemn the moral hypocrisy of American democracy. What makes Du Bois’s and Cone’s contributions to this cultural lineage distinctive are their appropriations of the biblical Christ for not only critiquing racial injustice but, more significantly, reimagining social justice beyond the racial binary of whiteness and Blackness itself. That is, the realm of the theological afforded Du Bois and Cone an avenue for both challenging the limits of and ultimately thinking beyond the realm of the political.
The contributions of theologians like James Hal Cone and Katie Geneva Canon to the broader theological project of Black liberational theology allows for a rich discourse on what it means to be Black in the world, In doing this, memories of trauma must be engaged head on in ways that they become anamnetic moments for reimagining a new way of being human that is inclusive of all persons, Consequently, this work argues for the reimagination of the Black Church and its theologies that speak to Black experiences in ways that do not reinstate the hegemonic power of Whiteness as a mode of being in the world. Furthermore, the content and hermeneutic spaces shaping Black theology is critiqued with the intent to create a healthy space for the experiences of Black members of the LGBTQ+ community.