Black Theology Research Paper

Liberation theology, a term first used in 1973 by Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian Roman Catholic priest, is a school of thought among Latin American Catholics according to which the Gospel of Christ demands that the church concentrate its efforts on liberating the people of the world from poverty and oppression. The main belief is that the church should be a movement for those who were denied their rights because they were poor (Sharon 12/3). The strength of liberation theology is in its compassion for the poor and its conviction that the Christian should not remain passive and indifferent to their plight. Man's inhumanity to man is sin and deserves the judgment of God and Christian resistance. Liberation theology is a plea for costly discipleship and a reminder that follow Jesus has practical social and political consequences. Liberation theology believes that the poor in favelas should take the example of Jesus and that the Church should act to bring about social change through base communities. Favelas are slums/ghettos (Sharon 12/3). Base communities are the grass roots organizations where people live, work, and form bible study groups (Sharon 12/3).

idea that theology is not universal, but tied to specific historical contexts. In A Black Theology of

For almost eight decades, enslaved African-Americans living in the Antebellum South, achieved their freedom in various ways—one being religion—before the demise of the institution of slavery. It was “freedom, rather than slavery, [that] proved the greatest force for conversion among African Americans in the South” (94). Starting with the Great Awakening and continuing long after the abolition of slavery, after decades of debate, scholars conceptualized the importance of religion for enslaved African-Americans as a means of escaping the brutalities of daily life. Overall, Christianity helped enslaved African American resist the degradation

One of the first things that attracted the African American slaves to Christianity was a way of obtaining the salvation of theirs souls based on the Christian’s idea of a future reward in heaven or punishment in hell, which did not exist in their primary religion. The religious principles inherited from Africa sought purely physical salvation and excluded the salvation of the soul. However, they did believe in one supreme God, which made it easier for them to assimilate Christianity.

The author starts out by describing the harsh situation slaves were put in and how the black experience in America is a history of servitude and resistance, of survival in the land of death. The spirituals are the historical songs which tell us what the slaves did to hold themselves together and to fight back against their oppressors. In both Africa and America, music was directly related to daily life and was an expression of the community’s view of the world and its existence in it. The central theological concept, which is the prime religious factor, in the black spirituals is the divine liberation of the oppressed from slavery. Further, the theological assumption of black slave religion as expressed in the spirituals was that slavery contradicts God, and therefore, God will liberate black people. This factor came from the fact that many blacks believed in Jesus, and therefore, believed that He could save them from the oppression of slavery because of his death and resurrection. The fact that the theme of divine liberation was present in the slave songs is supported by three main assertions: the biblical literalism of the blacks forced them to accept the white viewpoints that implied God’s approval of slavery, the black songs were derived from white meeting songs and reflected the "white" meaning of divine liberation as freeing one from sin (not slavery), and that the spirituals do not contain "clear references to the desire for freedom". The extent of

The distinction between White and Black Theology also exists because White Theology first used religion to oppress African Americans. “In the lynching era, between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these ‘Christians’ did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.” Just as the Europeans sought out the New World for religious freedom, so also did the African slaves. The journey to freedom was long and devastating. Greedy slave owners justified their sin by claiming the kidnapping and forced slavery of Africans was “God’s good reason for slavery,” and it was the white man’s duty to convert them and save their souls. But the question is, convert them to what- a white man? This, Du Bois claims is impossible. “How the fine sweet spirit of

Therefore, the God in black theology is the God of and for the oppressed, the God who comes into view in their liberation. Any other approach is a denial of biblical revelation (BTL; Pg.

In the African heritage they see the whole universe as scared, they also had many gods and different cults. Upon their arrival in to America in the early day’s ‘negroes’ were immediately stripped form their social heritage (Frazier,1964). They were now considered property of the whites and forced to be baptized in to Christianity, the white’s

Historically, black religion has been concerned with freedom, liberation, humanization, and the eradication of social evils in this world. Therefore, as opposed to being fixated exclusively with spirituality and heaven, the black church has been the vanguard of social, economic, and political activism within the black community. In fact, some scholars have gone as far as to identify the black church with the black community, and to suggest that neither can be identified apart from the other. The black church was born in protest against racism in the white church. The type of Christianity that Frederick Douglass characterized as “slave holding religion,” was a religion of the white status quo. It sought to justify the enslavement of blacks, rather than resist it and work towards its elimination. Reflecting on the period of American

But only with their practiced and faith they found a way to believe in something much greater than their earthly “owners” and more powerful than anything that can destroy their identity. Religion helped a lot of slaves maintain their purpose and roots around the world, slave owners stripped away their name, language, culture and history, but they couldn’t erase who some of these people were and who they wanted to t be, along with future generations. The struggle and lack of freedom through the American experience for African Americans, created something new when it came to Christianity, they interpreted biblical stories through the lens of their own misery while being enslaved. With thoughts of being a part of heaven and having the vision of being free in the biblical context, in which God and Jesus both had compassion for

Black theology can be traced back to when slavery times. During this time Christianity became the blacks man’s purpose of life,

Long before their contact with whites, Africans were a strongly religious, and deeply spiritual people. During the early history of slavery, the African American spirituality was often seen by whites as a pagan faith. These rituals and dogmas were seen by whites as Voodoo, Hoodoo, Witchcraft, and superstitions. They often commented on these "pagan practices," and fetishes, and were threatened by them. As a result, great effort was put on eradicating these practices, and many were lost within a generation.# Although tremendous efforts was placed on eradicating the “superstitious” religious beliefs of the African slaves, they were not immediately introduced to the religion of white slave masters, Christianity. Many planters resisted the idea of converting slaves to Christianity out of a fear that baptism would change a slave's legal status. The black population was generally untouched by Christianity until the religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. The Bible was manipulated to support the institution of slavery and its inhumane practices. Christianity was used to suppress and conform slaves. Slaveholders, priests, and those tied to the Church undermined the beliefs of the millions of African-Americans converts.# White Christianity was used to justify the enslavement of blacks. By the early nineteenth century, slaveholders had adopted the view that Christianity would make slaves more submissive and orderly.

James H. Cone’s God of the Oppressed is his examination of the origin, development, and significance of black theology as it relates to how he and the black Christian community view God. For Cone, in an America seemingly dominated by white theology and the white Christian community’s views of God, it is imperative to acknowledge and attentively listen to the voices of the theologies of other races and what God means to them, especially that of the black community. Cone asserts without hesitation that the God that is referred to in the Bible and black religion is a Deliver of those held captive by the bondage of oppression. Cone not only asserts this viewpoint of God as the Freer of oppressed people, but he validates this assertion through the use of Scripture, the black experience, history, and tradition. Overall, the central theme of this book is that a plethora of factors continually shape and construct a people’s theology and how that theology is significant in regards to how they see God, the world, and themselves.

W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk is an expressively persuasive text that gives its readers a glimpse at how slavery in America has influenced the way African Americans viewed the world around them and the effect that it had on their lives in society. In Of Our Spiritual Strivings Du Bois introduces the issue of African Americans being thought of as a problem; and he explains how when he was a child he first realized that he was different when the children in his class were exchanging greeting cards and one girl refused his card because of his skin tone. After this incident, he decided that he would show the world that he; as an African-American individual could be just as successful as white individuals. As time went on Du Bois begun

What is Christian Hip-Hop Rap? Christian rap focuses on religion, tough time, happy/ faithful moments. Christian rappers use their type of music to share their faith. Christian rap has many different names such as holy hip hop,gospel rap,Gospel hip hop,and christ hop.