James Hal Cone Analysis

Kelly Brown Douglas begins by posing a series of questions, including, “Who is the Black Christ?” and “Is the Black Christ Enough?” (6-7) For Douglas, the Black Christ, “…represents God’s urgent movement in human history to set Black captives free from the demons of White racism” (3). The question of “Who is the Black Christ?” is addressed in Chapter 3. The question of “Is the Black Christ enough?” is addressed in Chapters 4 and 5, as Douglas critically examines the relationship of the Black Christ to the Black community and ends with addressing what womanist theology is and why there is a need for it in understanding the Black Christ.

At the age of 12, he was born again and at the age of 14, Stanley was called into the ministry to preach God’s word where he began working in Christian Ministry. In 1956, he was ordained into the ministry at Moffett Memorial Baptist Church in Danville, Virginia. His determination to serve God led him to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Richmond and to earn a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. However, that same year he became the pastor of his first church Fruitland Baptist Church in North Carolina and began teaching at Fruitland Bible Institute. In 1968, Stanley received his Master’s and Doctorate of Theology from Luther Rice Seminary.

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

African slaves were brought to America from many tribes and they brought with them a variety of beliefs and practices. In some ways, the religion that many West Africans practiced bears a striking resemble to the practices of Christianity and Judaism. There are however several differences that make it clear that it is its own separate faith. On the plantations in America slaves were taught a “modify” version of Christianity so that they would obey their masters, and often times slaves would hold their own services. Other slaves believed in and practice what was called “conjuration” along with Christianity.

During a most dark and dismal time in our nations history, we find that the Africans who endured horrible circumstances during slavery, found ways of peace and hope in their religious beliefs. During slavery, African's where able to survive unbearable conditions by focusing on their spirituality.

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

“It should not be possible to treat a slave with Christian fairness and instruct him in the Christian faith as a just substitute for his pagan practices, without mollifying the relationship between master and slave. It has to be. Otherwise Christianity would not be able to spread. Otherwise the African would be deemed our equal simply because he shared out faith in one God and the Afterlife. We both know of the above to be false because of the evidence of how Africans live in their Primitive Land.” (p.111)

The element of worship has always been an essential part of the Black American culture. Black Americans “are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole.” 87% of blacks vs. 83% of all Americans affiliated with a religion according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public

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.

While black power focuses on the political, social, and economic condition of black people, Black Theology sees black identity from a theological context. Much of black liberation theology’s foundation comes from God's deliverance of Israel from oppression under the Egyptians. According to James Cone, “the consistent theme in Israelite prophecy is Yahweh's concern for "the lack of social, economic, and political justice for those who are poor and unwanted in the society."# The dominate view of Black Liberation theologists is “God in action, delivering the oppressed because of His righteousness. He is to be seen, not in the transcendent way of Greek philosophy, but immanent, among His people." God is "immanent”” because he is present in many historical moments that focus on liberation of the poor. Its derives it beliefs from the fact that in the bible, God often enters human affairs and takes the side of the oppressed, that god is heavily worshipped where human beings experience humiliation and suffering. Because of these beliefs, blacks adopted a gospel relevant to the uplifting of blacks and ending black struggle under white oppression.# Black theology places both our past and present actions toward black liberation in a theological context, eliminating all false Gods and creating value structures according to the God of black freedom.

All this comes together to show that Judah’s view of god in the beginning is a distant one and one that does not interfere with the world.

Correspondingly, as a means of freedom, Black theology views Salvation as a claims of reclamation for the things that were once stripped from the oppressed. According to James Cone, Salvation primarily has to do with earthly reality, not heavenly hopes. "To see the salvation of God is to see His people

Black men are multifaceted beings. What better deity to represent the multiple aspects of the black man than the Ancient Egyptian God, Thoft. Like the Black Man of today, Thoft had multiple responsibilities as the God of Knowledge, the Moon, Measurement, Wisdom, the Alphabet, Records, Thought, Intelligence, Meditation, the Mind, Logic, Reason, Reading, Hieroglyphics, Magic, Secrets, Scribes, and Writing. This blog strives give those interested a glimpse into the mind of the black male and its multiple dimensions.

Black liberation theology is the study of the lived experiences of African Americans as it related to the biblical accounts of oppression and liberation. The theology evokes a sense of empowerment within the African American community to fight on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Black liberation theology is the study the way in which they African Americans worship God and their religious beliefs of who God is for them and who he is to them. It not only describes the ancestral lives of the slaves, but also the continuing struggles of all African Americans to be liberated from oppression. Hence it is the theological account of the fight for freedom against a predominantly white Christian society that enslaved and dehumanized the African Americans for economic success.

Tillich’s existential diagnosis of the predicament of modern man leads him to formulate a norm for theology which isn’t any more convincing than the norms he dismisses. This observation leads back again to Tillich’s method of correlation. This method, he says, “explains