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1 Introducing Black and Jewish Responses to Experiences of Moral Evil and Suffering Notes 1 Introducing Black and Jewish Responses to Experiences of Moral Evil and Suffering 1. Some would say that the nature of faith is such that it cannot and should not be analyzed so thoroughly. In other words, it is not supposed to make sense. I am not satisfied by this response. Faith need not always be rational, but surely it need not be irrational. 2. I thank David Tracy for suggesting the need for clarification on this point. 3. Though I am phrasing the issue as one of theodicy, it may in fact be more help- ful to understand the positions of many of the thinkers explored in this work (especially Pinn and Rubenstein) as advocating a position of antitheodicy. Antitheodicy may be understood as a position in which there is no compulsion expressed for justifying God as good or powerful. For more on the usefulness or inadequacy of the category of theodicy, see Zachary Braiterman’s (God) After Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Sarah Katherine Pinnock’s Beyond Theodicy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002). I am indebted to Paul Mendes-Flohr for this important insight. 4. I agree with process and feminist theologians who interpret divine power as persuasive and creative, rather than coercive and dominating. However, the concept of God suggested in the present work is much more personal than the God of process theology as I understand it. For further interpretation of process theology in comparison to the theology developed here, see chapter 6. 5. Unlike Jones’ humanocentric theism, my revised notion does include God’s goodness. See chapter 6 for this distinction. 2 What Does the Christian Gospel Have to Do with the Black Power Movement?: James Cone’s God of the Oppressed 1. I thank Nathan Rickard for bringing this to my attention. It was a brief, but very significant moment in my academic life. 2. This assertion is a fundamental aspect of James Cone’s theological methodology. Before Cone, and other black theologians, Latin American liberation 198 Notes theologians, and feminist theologians, it had been assumed, largely by Western, white, male thinkers, that theology should be and was an objec- tive, detached exploration and proclamation of the Word of God, untainted by human concern or ideology. Cone and other progressive thinkers showed that what had been assumed to be objective and universal truth was really nothing more than subjective interpretations based on a white, male world- view and shaped by white, male concerns. Simply put, human experience and human interests shape theology. Consequently, Cone consistently begins theological treatments with a discussion of his history, as well as a more gen- eral context of black history in the United States. For Cone’s complete spir- itual and intellectual autobiography see his God of the Oppressed, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 1–7; My Soul Looks Back (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986); Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). See also Cone, “Black Theology: Where We Have Been and a Vision for Where We Are Going,” in Yearning to Breathe Free: Liberation Theologies in the United States, ed. Mar Peter-Rauol, Linda Rennie Forcey, and Robert Frederick Hunter, Jr. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990); Cone, “Looking Back, Going Forward: Black Theology as Public Theology,” Criterion 38 (Winter 1999): 18–27, 46. Finally, Rufus Burrow, Jr.’s “James H. Cone: Father of Contemporary Black Theology,” Asbury Theological Journal, (Fall 1993) provides a fairly recent and complete theological biography of Cone. 3. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 1. 4. Cone, My Soul Looks Back, 29–30. 5. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 5. 6. Ibid., 6. Throughout his work, Cone cites Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X as two of his primary influences. In his early writing Cone turns particularly to Malcolm X and the Black Power movement as theological sources. For discussions of the role of Black Power in his theology see Cone, “Christianity and Black Power,” in Is Anybody Listening to Black America, ed. C. Eric Lincoln (New York: Seabury Press, 1968); Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 20th anniv. ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989); Cone, “Black Theology and Black Liberation,” Christian Century 87 (Sept. 16, 1970): 1084–1088; Cone, “Black Theology and the Black Church: Where Do We Go from Here?” Mid-Stream 17 (July 1978): 267–277; and Cone, “Looking Back, Going Forward: Black Theology as Public Theology,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999). 7. See Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 96–98; and Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 20th anniv. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), xi–xx. 8. Jacqueline Grant explains that Cone did not address this issue until the mid- 1970s. Furthermore, Grant asserts, the first male black theologian who did was William R. Jones in his book, Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). There Jones stated, “[H]ere the issue of divine sexism becomes a live issue. What does Jesus’ assumption of a male form imply relative to the coequal status, the cohumanity and Notes 199 salvation of females?” (126). It would be a few years before the formal beginnings of Womanist Theology came. 9. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, xvii. 10. One could say that Cone’s work, especially from God of the Oppressed (1975) through Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), becomes focused on the links between black oppression in the United States and oppression throughout the world. From an initial analysis of African experience and philosophy as a methodological point, Cone’s theology turns next to Latin America and then to Asia in pur- suit of a more nuanced and complete treatment of the nature of oppression and the possibility of liberation. On Africa, see Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, “Black Theology and African Theology: Consideration for Dialogue, Critique and Integration,” in Black Faith and Black Solidarity: Pan-Africanism and Faith in Christ, ed. Priscilla Massie (New York: Friendship Press, 1973). On Latin America, see Cone, “From Geneva to Sao Paulo: A Dialogue between Black Theology and Latin American Liberation Theology,” in The Challenge of Basic Christian Communities: Papers from the International Ecumenical Congress of Theology, February 20–March 2, 1980, Sao Paulo, Brazil, ed. Sergi Torres and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981). On Asia, see Cone, “Asian Theology Today: Searching for Definitions,” Christian Century (May 23, 1979): 589–591. On the rela- tionship between black theology and third world theology in more general terms, see Cone, “Reflections from the Perspective of U.S. Blacks: Black Theology and Third World Theology,” in Irruption of the Third World: Challenge to Theology: Papers from the Fifth International Conference of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, August 17–29, 1981, New Delhi, India, ed. Virginia Fabella and Sergios Torres (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983); Cone, “Black Theology and Third World Theologies,” Chicago Theological Seminary Register 73:1 (1983): 3–12; Cone, “Black Theology: Its Origin, Methodology, and Relationship to Third World Theologies,” in both Doing Theology in a Divided World: Papers from the Sixth International Conference of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, January 5–13, 1983, Geneva, Switzerland, ed. Virginia Fabella and Sergio Torres (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), and in Church in Struggle: Liberation Theologies and Social Change in North America, ed. William K. Tabb (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986). Ironically enough, Cone’s attention to third world oppression preceded his recognition of the connections between black oppression in the United States and oppression of other minorities within his own country. On these relationships, see his For My People, 157–174. 11. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, xviii; Cone, For My People, 88–96. 12. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, xviii. 13. Cone often turned to Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among other white thinkers, throughout Black Theology and Black Power and Black Theology of Liberation. By his Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992) and God of the Oppressed (1975, 1997) Cone had fully and consciously made the transition to building 200 Notes his constructive theology on black experience and black history, at the exclusion of, or at least suspicion of, white sources. For a curiously intense and superficial white critique of Cone’s reliance on “white” sources at the neglect of “the black religious experience,” see Frederick Sontag’s “Coconut Theology: Is James Cone the ‘Uncle Tom’ of Black Theology?” Journal of Religious Thought 36 (Fall–Winter 1979): 5–12; see also Archie Smith, Jr.’s “A Black Response to Sontag’s ‘Coconut Theology’ ” Journal of Religious Thought 36 (Fall–Winter 1979): 13–25. Smith retorts that Cone’s method- ological danger is not his portrayal of the black religious experience, but rather his “uncritical acceptance and seemingly idolatrous allegiance to black power.” Clearly, Cone has been criticized for everything from “being too black” to not being the right type of black to not “being black enough.” To an extent, these wide-ranging criticisms from all sides indicate not that Cone is misguided but, on the contrary, that he was quite insightful in his theology, in my opinion. 14. Cone acknowledges that several of the early representatives of black theol- ogy, including Gayraud Wilmore, Cecil Cone, Charles Long, and Henry Mitchell, emphasized this point (For My People, 86–88). These thinkers maintained that, for black theology to be truly black, one had to turn to the black experience in the United States, and eventually and fundamentally to African sources.
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