Narrating Black Theology

2020 ◽  
pp. 85-110
Author(s):  
Kristopher Norris
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Narrative Theology ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
The Church

Employing the theology of James Cone as a representative of black liberation theology, this chapter analyzes the narrative basis of his ecclesiology as a vision of the church untethered from whiteness. The analysis demonstrates the ways Cone’s ecclesiology contrasts and refines Hauerwas’s. It attends specifically to the ways his narrative theology offers more promising resources for rightly telling the story of white Christianity and offering better witness to our whiteness. This chapter identifies the three conceptual elements of an ethic of responsibility in his thought—memory, particularity, and concreteness. Then, drawing on womanist engagement with his work, argues that Cone offers the concept of “narrative blackness” that invites white theologians and Christians to a form of conversion he calls “becoming black.”

scholarly journals Looking Back at the Evolution of James Cone’s Theological Anthropology: A Brief Commentary

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 596
Author(s):  
Sekhmet Ra Em Kht Maat
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
Swiss German

Reverend Dr. James Hal Cone has unquestionably been a key architect in defining Black liberation theology. Trained in the Western theological tradition at Garrett Theological Seminary, Cone became an expert on the theology of Twentieth-century Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth. Cone’s study of Barth led to his 1965 doctoral dissertation, “The Doctrine of Man in the Theology of Karl Barth,” where he critically examined Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and Church Dogmatics. His contemporaries and more recent African American theologians and religious scholars have questioned the extent to which Karl Barth’s ideas shaped Cone’s Black theology. The purpose of this brief commentary is to review the major ideas in “The Doctrine of Man” and Black Theology and Black Power, his first book, to explore which theological concepts Cone borrows from Barth, if any, and how Cone utilizes them within his articulation of a Black theological anthropology and Black liberation theology.

scholarly journals Blackness as an ontological symbol: The way forward

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-113
Author(s):  
Mary-Anne Plaatjies-Van Huffel
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
Strategies For Change ◽  
Western Perspective ◽  
The Way

This article focuses on Black liberation theology from a non-western perspective and suggests a deconstructive treatment of Black liberation theology, engaging Cone’s work critically. The critical question in reading texts on Black theology is whether poststructural theories on language, subjectivity, social processes, and institutions can identify areas and strategies for change with regard to Black liberation theology. James Cone was critical regarding a poststructural foundational approach. Even so, this article uses poststructuralism as a lens to attend to the subthemes of blackness as ontological symbol, dethroning the author in a poststructural discourse of Black theology, Black theology and Black power, Black liberation theology and anthropology, and Black theology and experience.

scholarly journals Cone's Consistency: Reflections from a Teaching Assistant

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-88
Author(s):  
Thurman Todd Willison
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Student Perspective ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Student Voices ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
Home Institution ◽  
Union Theological Seminary ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Church

Beyond his academic contribution of Black Liberation Theology to the church and academy at large, James Cone should be remembered on a personal level as one who prioritized the task of teaching his students, placed the student perspective and the development of independent student voices at the center of his pedagogy, pushed his students to take classroom learning out into the world, maintained exemplary standards of consistency in his theological work and moral character, and contributed to the legacy of his home institution Union Theological Seminary in immeasurable ways. This is one of several short essays presented by recent students at a public forum at Union Theological Seminary after his death in 2018.  

Race, Religion, and the Race for the White House

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwight N. Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Black Church ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Black Religion ◽  
White House ◽  
2008 Presidential Election ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding Obama's former, prophetic pastor Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One of the fascinating developments in the 2008 presidential election has been the insertion of black religion and black theology into the discourse. For instance, on February 10, 2007, Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the White House. Shortly after, the New York Times published an article suggesting that Obama was beginning to distance himself from his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and that Obama might be linked to a radical form of black Christianity. The chapter argues for a need for a nationwide conversation on black religion, the black church, and black liberation theology.

The Prophetic Voice of the Church in a Democratic South Africa – A Theological Reflection

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lufuluvhi Maria Mudimeli
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
The State ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
Prophetic Voice ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

This article is a reflection on the role and contribution of the church in a democratic South Africa. The involvement of the church in the struggle against apartheid is revisited briefly. The church has played a pivotal and prominent role in bringing about democracy by being a prophetic voice that could not be silenced even in the face of death. It is in this time of democracy when real transformation is needed to take its course in a realistic way, where the presence of the church has probably been latent and where it has assumed an observer status. A look is taken at the dilemmas facing the church. The church should not be bound and taken captive by any form of loyalty to any political organisation at the expense of the poor and the voiceless. A need for cooperation and partnership between the church and the state is crucial at this time. This paper strives to address the role of the church as a prophetic voice in a democratic South Africa. Radical economic transformation, inequality, corruption, and moral decadence—all these challenges hold the potential to thwart our young democracy and its ideals. Black liberation theology concepts are employed to explore how the church can become prophetically relevant in democracy. Suggestions are made about how the church and the state can best form partnerships. In avoiding taking only a critical stance, the church could fulfil its mandate “in season and out of season” and continue to be a prophetic voice on behalf of ordinary South Africans.

scholarly journals The black church as the womb of black liberation theology?: Why the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA) is not a genuine black church?

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rothney S. Tshaka
Keyword(s):  
Southern Africa ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Critical Theology ◽  
Dutch Reformed Church

This article sets forth a controversial thesis which suggests that the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, although considered a black church, is in fact not a black church in the sense in which a radical black church is traditionally understood. A black church, it is argued, is perceived to be one that is a self-determined church which supports initiatives of ameliorating the depressive situations in which black people find themselves. References are made to black theology as a critical theology which was never accepted in the black church due to the dependency syndrome which was brought about by the white benevolence of the Dutch Reformed Church. This, it is argued, had become innate in the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa which still considers itself as a so-called daughter church of the white Dutch Reformed Church.

An Ethic of Responsibility

2020 ◽  
pp. 113-142
Author(s):  
Kristopher Norris
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Wicked Problem ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽  
Racial Reconciliation ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Liberation Theology

This chapter begins the constructive turn in the book and outlines the contours and substance of an ethic of responsibility. The chapter begins by noting the impotence of efforts at “racial reconciliation” and offers the idea of “original sin” as a more accurate lens for addressing whiteness. The failure of white churches and theologians to reckon with the power of whiteness suggests the need for a new approach: an ethic of responsibility built upon the shared commitments of Cone and Hauerwas, and their mutual appeal to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as the criticisms and corrections that black liberation theology directs at white theology. As a process of formation, an ethic of responsibility promotes radical, communal action to confront through material practices the wicked problem of whiteness, while also recognizing the lingering challenges of whiteness within a broken and wounded body of Christ.

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