Jeremiah Wright at the NAACP
The Associated Press

Jeremiah Wright has become the face of black liberation theology in America.

Featured Topic | Posted 30 weeks 18 hours ago

Does black liberation theology matter?

An upshot of the controversy surrounding Barack Obama's ex-pastor is the new focus on black liberation theology.

Jeremiah Wright Jr. of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago is one of the foremost adherents of this theology. A man of capacious learning and ego, Wright stands condemned of late as a incendiary radical for his views that the American government may have created AIDS and that the 9/11 terror attacks were payback for the sins of U.S. foreign policy.

But many black theologians (even those who take strong exception to Wright’s views and argue that black liberation theology is a politicized artifact of an earlier era) defend him and say that the news media and Obama’s foes have caricatured him and misunderstood the intentionally provocative role of a liberationist pastor. “Deep down in all of us is that Malcolm X who cries out in such strong language,” said James Cone, who is a professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary and one of the founding fathers of black liberation theology.

Black liberation theology “gives special privilege to the oppressed,” said Gary Dorrien, a professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. “God is seen as a partisan, liberating force who gives special privilege to the poorest.”

But where does that leave Christianity's message of redemption for all people, everywhere? And is the politics of black liberation more important than the theology? 

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Ben likes: The peculiar theology of black liberation

Spengler/Asia Times

In the black liberation theology taught by Wright, Cone and Hopkins, Jesus Christ is not for all men, but only for the oppressed:

In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors ... Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation and against the white oppressors, or he is not [Cone].

In this respect black liberation theology is identical in content to all the ethnocentric heresies that preceded it. Christianity has no use for the nations, a "drop of the bucket" and "dust on the scales", in the words of Isaiah. It requires that individuals turn their back on their ethnicity to be reborn into Israel in the spirit. That is much easier for Americans than for the citizens of other nations, for Americans have no ethnicity. But the tribes of the world do not want to abandon their Gentile nature and as individuals join the New Israel. Instead they demand eternal life in their own Gentile flesh, that is, to be the "Chosen People."

That is the "biblical scholarship" to which Obama referred in his March 14 defense of Wright and his academic prominence.

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Joel likes: Project Trinity

Kelefa Sanneh/New Yorker

“Christianity is the white man’s religion.” That was Malcolm X’s verdict, and though he meant it to be final, a generation of black Christian leaders decided to treat it as provisional. In 1969, a thirty-one-year-old theologian named James H. Cone published “Black Theology & Black Power,” a short, astringent book that Wright would use as a blueprint for Trinity. Cone proposed a reciprocal arrangement: just as the Black Power movement could find redemption in the Church, so the Church -- dominated and distorted by generations of white men -- could find redemption in the Black Power movement. He wrote that there was “a need for a theology whose sole purpose is to emancipate the gospel from its ‘whiteness’ so that blacks may be capable of making an honest self-affirmation through Jesus Christ.” And he argued that, since African-American suffering was such a powerful metaphor for the suffering of Christ, color-blind Christianity was a contradiction in terms. “To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen,” he wrote. “God has chosen black people!”

Like many brash-sounding manifestos of the era, this one came with fine-print qualifications. Throughout the book, Cone was careful to explain that a black-centered Church need not be a black-separatist Church. And even the simplest phrases -- “black people,” for instance -- turned out to be slippery. It wasn’t about being “physically black,” he wrote. “To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.” In his view, blackness was as radically inclusive as Christianity itself, and just as demanding.

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Thoughts

** It's just ideology, stupid **

Submitted on May 5th, 2008 by Anonymous

** Those not with us are against us. (Luke 11:23 NIV) **

Xian intolerance and self-righteousness were traits noted with distaste by Romans two thousand years ago. (See R. Wilken. The christians as the romans saw them. Yale Pr. 1984)

The new religion appealed to poor, uneducated, displaced people pushed into swarming slums in the eastern roman empire. With Jerusalem destroyed and the province of Palestine subjugated in 70 CE, thousands of anti-roman jews escaped into Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Alexandria, and Rome where there were already jewish enclaves.

Cults of Jesus appealed to marginalized jews and pagan malcontents who wanted a world cleansed of roman occupation, who hoped for a religious military leader, who wanted revenge.

First among them appears Paul of Tarsus, an apostate hellenized jew, whose letters to xian cells are considered "holy writ" even today. Paul fashioned a mythical being of cosmic proportions. Christ would return from an otherworldly reality to purify his believers, destroy the roman empire, and bring about a magical end of the world.

In short, Paul and his fellow revenge seekers needed a god sharing their nihilistic values. He and the primitive church had a perverse self-understanding:

27 God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things, and the things that are not, to nullify the things that are. . . ." 1Cor1:27-28 NIV

Xianity still appeals to those who believe themselves mistreated. To those in whom resentment surges. To those who must blame others. To those who must punish their guilty selves. Xianity is practical nihilism.

Directed inward, hatred of self. Directed outward, hatred of others and the world.

Xianity is also highly addictive nihilism. The 'New Testament' is pure christo-myth.

bipolar2
© 2008

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