Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr (OUP, 2014) (original) (raw)
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Facilitating God's preferred future: Faith formation, missional transformation and theological education, 2023
Desmond Tutu is credited with saying, “When the missionaries first came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” This story highlights a tension between mission-initiated Christianity, and its use of the Bible, and the decolonial turn that is taking place in Southern African Methodism. In some postcolonial settings it is assumed that to regain the land (justice) we will need to give back the missionary Bible. That may not be the case. One of the pioneers of Black, African, and decolonial Biblical Hermeneutics in Southern Africa is the Methodist theologian, Itumeleng Mosala. He advocates for the embracing of contextual experience, minoritized hermeneutics, and the incorporation of voices from the margins in our reading and understanding of biblical texts. His strategy aims to free African Bible readers from the cultural dependency, exploitation, and oppression that they encounter in much contemporary Biblical scholarship. This is a decolonial enterprise that decentres Western universalism and centres Black African experience. His approach is not only concerned with hermeneutics, but also with ethical concerns that relate to faith and justice. In deeply religious contexts, like Southern Africa, there are significant ethical implications related to the ways in which persons and communities study the Bible and interpret sacred texts. How we read the Bible, with whom we read the Bible, why we read the Bible, and our interpretations of texts from the Bible, shape both the religious and political lives of believers. As African theologians we need to recognise that our interpretations (as well as those of the persons that we study) are ethically laden. This paper will present a tentative decolonial Southern African Methodist perspective on the studying of the Bible. It hopes to contribute towards resolving the tension we face between having “the Bible” and not having “the land”. It will consider how we might engage the Bible from our experience, with our hopes, as African Christians, for the sake of justice and the flourishing of humans and creation.
Warren Jounral of Theology, 2022
This paper builds on James Cones' Black Liberation Theology (BLT) and grants the well-known fact that BLT leans heavily on the Hebrew Bible’s Exodus motif for its hermeneutic. Cones used the Exodus motif to argue for the need for oppressed communities to create their own space separate from the oppressors whereby they can formulate their own identity. Cones construct in some ways speaks of the first stage of Black Liberation but does not address the inevitable social-structural demands that the oppressed community will have to, at some point, integrate (as American history proves for Blacks in America). In that case, the New Exodus (Return from Exile) motifs in the Hebrew Bible envision a life of the inevitable integration. But, it offers a potential paradigm, whereby the former oppressors are integrated through a reversal motif in which their power differential has been deconstructed. Tracing then, the Hebrew Bible's Return from Exile motifs through the trajectory of the NT, whereby it is fulfilled in the Son of Man's ministry, this paper offers another paradigm for racial justice in the Christian context.