There is a good reason why this project is doomed to failure

books:


	• A Black Theology of Liberation (Ethics and Society) James H. Cone Orbis Books, 1990 - 214 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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Great Book

This is a well written book which explains how Afro-Americans are able to take Marxist ideology and hammer it into a "religion." If this is a religion, what is a political party? Take out the perfunctory lip service to "Christ" and you end up with a nice racist jihad against whitey.
If this guy's theory is valid, all "oppressed" people on this planet are entitled to create their own "religion" to cloak their racial attacks on some other race. Didn't the Nazis say they were oppressed by the WWI allies and the Jews? If only they could have read this book first, they could have called their political party a religion instead. Maybe they coud have called it Nazi Liberation Theology.

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Liberation theology at its best.

Since this book was published, it has consistently been met with an authoritarian thunder by those who cling rigidly to their religious orthodoxy. I read this book while a graduate student in theology at the Pacific School of Religion. The professor who introduced me to Professor Cone's work (no wilting flower herself) Rosemary Radford Ruether, opened a new and vibrant awareness to the work of authors engaged in contextual and liberation theological perspectives.

It is interesting to note that Professor Cone's book was written in a historic moment at the apex of black oppression in cities throughout this country: the oppression was disseminated under the rubric of economic exclusion, educational segregation, environmental terror, and job discrimination, to name a few. While Martin Luther King was the public face of overturning years of white terror perpetuated on black people, Professor Cone was giving voice to the anger and rage of en entire people and demanding the overturning of the forces of white privilege.

While Cone was developing his version of liberation theology independent of its Latin American version developed by Gustav Gutierrez, both authors were giving voice to marginal populations now asserting their human dignity and worth. Moreover, these demands for justice began to form under new contexts of interpretive value of the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. The radical message of the gospel still reverberates well into our contemporary moment and raise the same issues Jesus raised in his own day. Patronage and systemic oppression needs to be confronted and overturned. This is the context from which Cone writes - and I suspect - still lives his life.

I give Professor Cone's book my highest recommendation.

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Worldview, ones way to make sense of things

Jesus taught his followers to be in the World but not of the World. Hatred of other racial groups, hatred of other ethnic groups and discrimination based on ones ancestry is evidence that God's church often is in the World and of the World. Community norms often due influence theological thought, philosophy, and ones religious perspective. Wrongheaded, inconsistent theological rationale and outright contradictory teaching to Gods scripture come forth from the pulpit, the Sunday school room and the seminary. These things deserve opposition and doing so is doing the work of God. To be God's work it must be consistent with the Bible. In most cases being obedient to the government is a Christian thing to do. One should never allow love of country, love ones ancestors, or ones heritage cloud ones love of God or define who God is.
The author of this book, James H. Cone, perceived an evil, hate filled America that discriminated against black people. It is his argument that the white church whether Fundamental in character or mainline Protestantism in thought the ultimate outcome is to uplift white people and diminish black people. The author of this book found following white developed theology by descendents of slaves as contra productive to spiritual and physical well being of the black man. Perceiving that a large segment of the black population would not leave the church, he wrote an argument how the black church should change its theology so to work to fit its needs. This book is not an argument that theology should not be influenced by societal norms, but an embracement of the community determining theology based on its needs. The author makes a distinction between the philosophy of religion and the theology of religion. Under his definition theology is determined by the community while philosophy is the arguments and thoughts about God that fit logic but are foreign to the masses. Theology is the continued attempt by the community to give reason for being. The function of the church is not spiritual renew in the sense people are atoned for their sins, but to find a place in this world, to have an independent thought from white racist society, and live independent from the structures set up by the white man. The white man, the white government and the white church are evil.
In the book there are very few scriptural references. There are plenty of quotes from theologians. While the author is critical to Fundamental theologian and liberal theologian for the same result by different means, he feels free to use the liberal theologian's philosophy to determine theology based on community needs and thought processes. James H. Cone does use the concepts of the Kingdom of God, sin, God's wrath, Jesus identifying himself with the oppressed, God punishing evil and God being in work in the world. He argues any attempt to argue for turning the other cheek, subservient to those in authority, or seek change through peaceful means are the chains of white oppressors theology. Page 67 "(.... We should not conclude that the Bible is an infallible witness. God is neither the author of the Bible, nor is the writers His secretaries. "Jesus is black. We cannot rely on the Bible to tell the truth about him. The church sole purpose is to liberate Black people. White people should repent for thinking white and only learn as the black theologian teaches him. A rationale for black independent thought.

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There is a good reason why this project is doomed to failure

This is a clever attempt to redefine and broaden the white Christian theological tent so that it becomes humane enough to embrace black and other liberation causes of the oppress. It correctly defines northern liberal theology as being independent of black suffering; and southern conservative theology as being defined so that it is compatible with white racism. While all this is trivially true, the larger issue remains unaddressed. It is that Reverend Cone's enterprise cannot succeed because there are larger issues involved that transcend and are prior to theology itself.

The most economical, if not the best way to describe them is by using Ernest Becker's idea of a "hero system." According to Becker, the struggle in life that transcends religion is the struggle for self-esteem. It is this struggle that ultimately gives meaning to life in the current world, not religion or theology per se. All religions, through culture, are put at the service of the meaning developed out of the struggle for self-esteem. The context in which the struggle for self-esteem takes place and thrives is of course as a "Hero System" within the confines of a particular culture.

American Christianity takes place within the confines of and under the control of American racist cultural and social parameters. The job of liberation is to redefine all meaning within such a culture so that the self-esteem project of the oppressed rises to the same level as that of the oppressor, but within a culture defined by the oppressor's self-esteem machinery. In short, even God Himself cannot liberate us from a social hierarchy that, in meaning, is itself logically prior to religion.

The way the Jews liberated themselves from the Egyptians, as well as from other oppressors, remains transparent to the scriptures mainly because what the Jews did transcended the bible and theology itself: They changed the paradigm of oppression so that God himself was redefined: He no longer was an "object" but was an "idea within the head," a "unitary God in the mind," as it were. This paradigm shift went beyond the normal confines of the cultural parameters.

One could argue that this was a conceptual trick that transcends the context of culture and theology, and thus works in a world where the struggle for self-esteem is a superior value to, and that also transcends and is logically prior to, religion and theology.

Absorbing this broad notion is of course a tricky proposition for religious people working within the context of a culture not of their own making. This remains the case even for a religious scholar as brilliant and as learned as professor Cone and his colleagues at the Union Theological Seminary. One of my heroes (also a graduate of the Union Theological Seminary) the illustrative Professor Cornel West has tried to finesse this very point by declaring himself a "Chekovian Christian." It is of course an obvious attempt to do exactly what Professor Cone is trying to do here: "Side step" the fact that American white theology is designed specifically for the needs of the white ego and self-esteem machine. In short, white Christianity is a part of the "racist white male hero system."

All attempts to redefine it, and thus to define a healthy self-respecting liberation black theology under this racist tent is doomed to failure for the reasons stated above. Liberation is work that must proceed from above culture, within the conscious mind of the oppressed. It is work that only the oppressed can do for itself. It is not an appeal that can be made from within the depths of an existing hero system. It is system level creative work, not subsystem level creative work.

And while this is a valiant attempt; it can't be pulled off. And in the end it too must fail. But the discussion, which amounts to so much flailing in the dark, does indeed clarify the picture of why it cannot work.

Cone's appeal is to teardown the "false white religious tent" and replace it with a "better more humane black religious tent." But he wants to do so while under the racist white religious tent, and thus in doing so it leaves out the larger issues and the psychological structures upon which all religions are hung: the self-esteem machine, the cultural hero system. Good try. Amen.

And five stars.

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