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Table
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I contend that theological
language must be paradoxical because of the necessity of
affirming two dimensions of reality which appear to be
contradictory. For example, my experience of being black-skinned
means that I cannot de-emphasize the literal significance of blackness. My
people were enslaved, lynched, and ghettoized in the name of God
and country because of their color. No amount of theologizing
can remove the reality of that experience from my consciousness.
And because blacks were dehumanized by white-skinned people who
created a cultural style based on black oppression, the literal
importance of whiteness has historical referents.
But that is only one aspect
of my experience. When I begin to investigate the particular
experience of blackness and whiteness in America, I begin to see
beyond it. Through my particular experience of blackness, I
encounter the symbolic significance of black existence and how
that existence is related to god’s revelation in Jesus Christ. In the divine-human
encounter, the particular experience of oppression and
liberation, as disclosed in black-skinned people, is affirmed as
God’s own experience; and through that divine affirmation, I
encounter the universal meaning of oppression and liberation
that is not limited by skin color. The same is true for the
literal and symbolic meaning of whiteness, which has the
opposite meaning of blackness.
Dialogue on Black Theology
Table (contd.)
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Defining Religion:
Religion is a search for meaning when you don't have
it in this world. So, while they might have controlled the black
people physically and politically and economically, they did not
control their spirit. That's why the black churches are very
powerful forces in the African American community and always has
been. Because religion has been that one place where you have an
imagination that no one can control. And so, as long as you know
that you are a human being and nobody can take that away from
you, then God is that reality in your life that enables you to
know that. . . . : Even though you're living under the shadow of
the lynching tree. Because religion is a spirit that is not
defined by what people can do to your body. They can kill your
body, but they can't kill your soul. We were always told that.
There is a spirit deep in you that nobody can take away from you
because it's a creation that God gave to you. Now, if you know
you have a humanity that nobody can take away from you, they may
lock you up. They may lynch you. But, they don't win.
James Cone
Bill Moyers Journal
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Table
(contd.)
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A Conversation with Wilson
Rudy: Topics like church and religion
make me uneasy, and especially when one talks about individual
beliefs and faith and how well they have been absorbed and
lived. It gives me no pleasure at all in taking up the
subject of how blacks actually live out their religion and how
the “Black Church” actually operates in our lives.
Of
course, as black women, you probably are much more familiar with
those intimate matters than I. I say that only because it is
primarily black women who make the numbers in the “Black
Church.” I am like most black men at odds with and outside the
“Black Church.”
But the role of the black church in
liberation struggle is a necessary topic. It needs more poignant
reflective thought than it has been given in the last several
decades. In my humble view the so-called Black Church is
probably one of the most reactionary, perverse institutions
within the black community, and have become more so since the
deaths of Martin and Malcolm. There was hope when it retained
its congregational, community, agrarian oriented aspects. As it
manifests itself in urban centers now in the South, North,
elsewhere, they are harbors for sycophants, demagogues, and
scoundrels—now educated and trained in the best seminaries,
and thus loaded down with well-honed dogma and doctrines which
they hoist by force upon the people.
Defining Religion, Describing
Religious Practice
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Table
(contd.)
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Central to Cone’s own interpretation is his
conviction that a very evident theme of liberation pervades the
spirituals. “So far from being songs of passive resignation,
the spirituals are black freedom songs which emphasize black
liberation as consistent with divine revelation.” Through the
skillful use of illustrations from the spirituals, he
convincingly demonstrates that “the theological assumption of
black slave religion as expressed in the spirituals was that
slavery contradicts God, and he will therefore liberate black
people.”
But, Cone adds, the spirituals do not provide
a simplistic or escapist solution. Black suffering is faced
honestly and realistically in the spirituals; there is no
attempt to explain it away or to dismiss it as unimportant.
Rather, these songs gave a theological perspective to suffering
– as expressed, for example, in the line “I’m so glad that
trouble don’t last always.” Cone likens the spirituals’
treatment of the problem of suffering to that of the Old
Testament books of Job and Habbakuk. Christian hope, he says,
“is a vision and promise for the poor, the sick and the
weak.” In this regard he excoriates those white theologians
who have promulgated a theology of hope based on “theological
abstractions” rather than on the sufferings of the oppressed.
The Spiritual
and the Blues
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Books
Ron Walters.
The Price of Racial Reconciliation (2008)
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Table (contd.)
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To suggest that Thomas Gray created the religious world contained
in the “Confessions” is to speak absurdities. We owe much
gratitude to Gray and numerous other white men for saving tons of
slave literature. The questioning of the authority of this
revelatory text is thus a red herring, expressing an unwillingness
to accept Turner’s religious perspective. This obtuseness does
not in any manner lessen the “Confessions” as the actual words
of Nathaniel Turner. It is a document to which he testified in a
Southampton court as his truth.
To
know Turner then we must look first and foremost at Turner’s own
words than what others say about him. Turner’s basic referent
was neither William Garrison nor David Walker. The Bible and its
testaments were his foundation. As an adult, his mentors were not
New England abolitionists, but the Holy Spirit and Christ, persons
who possessed much more reality for him than any Boston social
reformer. Despite the biblical illiteracy of today’s generation,
the Bible story was our story. The scriptures are the grounding of
our major cultural roots, far more so than the political
ideologies that have gathered together to call themselves
“black” or “African.”
Before modern education and the secularization
of America, African Americans were a biblical people.
Bible
and Sword
Table (contd.)
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Frustration with being regarded as
"a marginal voice" often encourages clergy to embrace
the language of the modern state. Preachers begin to talk like
politicians, and while gaining some credibility as political
power brokers, in the process they tend to lose the prophetic
edge that they could and should bring to the political debate
and to the process of imagining a better society.
This is a temptation to which Dr. King never
yielded. He consistently employed theological concepts and
language to challenge the modern state to be more just and
inclusive. He opined on practical and concrete political
matters, but only insofar as they were outgrowths of the
theological and ethical principles he espoused.
It is humbling,
hopeful, and empowering to consider that preachers, church
women, and Sunday school children led a revolution in our
lifetime. They marched, prayed, voted, and challenged the nation
to, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "conform America's
political reality to her political rhetoric." They have passed
the baton to us.
—Robert M. Franklin, "Awesome
Music, Great Preaching, and Revolutionary Action: The Mind of
Martin Luther King, Jr.," The Princeton Seminary
Bulletin, XXIII (2), 2003. * * * *
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updated 3 April 2008
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