Black Liberation Theology can be defined as the relationship that blacks have with god in their struggle to end oppression. It sees god as a god of history and the liberator of the oppressed from bondage. Black Liberation theology views God and Christianity as a gospel relevant to blacks who struggle daily under the oppression of whites.
Because of slavery, blacks concept of God was totally different from the masters who enslaved them.White Christians saw god as more of a spiritual savior, the reflection of God for blacks came in the struggle for freedom by blacks. Although the term black liberation theology is a fairly new, becoming popular in the early 1960’s with Black Theology and Black Power, a book written by James H. Cone, its ideas are pretty old, which can be clearly seen in spirituals sang by Africans during the time of slavery nearly 400 years ago.# It was through these hymns that black liberation spawned.
Although Cone is given credit for “the discovery of black liberation theology,” it’s beliefs can quite clearly be seen in the efforts of men like preacher Nat Turner and his rebellion of slavery in mid 1800’s or Marcus Garvey, one of the first men to “see god through black spectacles” in the early 1900’s.More recently black theology emerged as a formal discipline. Beginning with the "black power" movement in 1966, black clergy in many major denominations began to reassess the relationship of the Christian church to the black community. Black caucuses developed in the Catholic, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches."The central thrust of these new groups was to redefine the meaning and role of the church and religion in the lives of black people. Out of this reexamination has come what some have called Black Theology.
# Although closely related and often confused with black power, the two differ in concepts. 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.Black theology can be traced back to when slavery times.
During this time Christianity became the blacks man’s purpose of life, the principle around which lives were structured. For blacks during slave times, church served as school, social club, political arena, and conservatory of music.Of course when Africans arrived to the New World they did not know Christianity. Although these slaves came from various tribes along the west coast of Africa, their religion populated by several powers, including the forces of nature and a legion of magical spirits, most tribes believed in a Supreme Being who was viewed as a creator, giver of rain, and sunshine, the all-seeing one, the one who exists by himself.Moreover traditional African religion made no distinction between the sacred and secular.
All of life was sacred. There was no division between this life and the one to come. 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.African Americans, however, began to look at Christianity in a totally different manner. Although slavery was often spoken of in the bible#, it does not describe Africans as the unwanted race and condemn them to slavery.
Because blacks had different needs than whites, Christianity was used to uplift them from the institution of slavery.Slaves prayed secretly to God as their only master and asked to be liberated from their owners. Slaves identified themselves with the Old Testament Hebrew slaves as they were liberated by God. To them, faith was now a belief in and commitment to a God that helped the poor and judged the arrogant and the strong, their owners.Now, God instead of the plantation owner was the actual master of the slaves. Slaves believed that if God had sided against religious and political powers in the Bible, then he would free them from the oppression of slavery.
They conducted secret worship and prayer far away from the eyes of their masters. In 1830’s during the religious awakening in the South the slave owners were now bringing the Gospel to the quarters and this served as social control and as a way to convert the slaves.By 1860, about 15 percent of the slaves were members of either the Baptist or Methodist church. There they heard the same sermons, had the same discipline, and shared the communion table with whites.
# Despite the efforts of whites, slaves would still listen to their own black preachers and they would translate the Bible in a way in which it showed that they were God’s chosen people.In the book of Exodus in the bible, Moses leads the chosen people, the Israelites, to freedom from Egyptian rule. With black religion, slaves claimed themselves as the chosen people and that god would deliver them from oppression. Slaves felt that is was god’s will that they be free, this can be seen in the books of Deuteronomy 23:15-16, Luke 4:18-19 and Isaiah 58:1-7. He who needs salvation is defined is one who has been threatened or oppressed, and his salvation consists in deliverance from danger and tyranny or rescue from imminent peril.
“The kingdom is for the poor and not for the rich because the former has nothing to from this world while the latter’s entire existence is grounded in his commitment to worldly things. The weak and helpless may expect everything from God while the oppressor my expect nothing because of his refusal to free himself from his pride.”#James H Cone was born in Bearden, Arkansas in 1939. A young man living in the south at the time of segregation and membership at the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church allowed him to experience the life-affirming community of the black Church alongside the harsh reality of white racism at an early age.The South at the time of Cone’s childhood was completely segregated, he felt that the whites in his community often "tried to make us believe that God created black people to be white people's servants.
" Early, James noticed that Sunday was the most segregated day of the week, and that whites even separated themselves when it came to religion.It was this that caused Cone to question the faith of whites, he pondered, how do they call themselves Christians and treat blacks this way? He also encountered what he terms "an uncritical faith in many black churches." At the age of sixteen, he was called to ministry. During his last two years of high school, he preached at several small churches throughout is community.Through research, Cone learned himself about the Montgomery bus boycotts and was often quoted saying that he wanted to be just like Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.. He also studied Malcolm X and his idea that “Christ wasn’t white, Christ was black.The poor, brain washed negro has been made to believe that Christ was white to maneuver him into worshipping the white man.
” He received a B.A. degree from Philander Smith College in Arkansas in 1958, a B.D.
degree from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1961, and M.A. and Ph.D.
degrees from Northwestern University in 1963 and 1965.The civil rights movement was in full swing by 1965. The nonviolent efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
, the ideas of Malcolm X, and the promotion of Black Power by Stokley Carmichael provided an insight for Cone’s Christianity.“Even though he had both a seminary and doctoral education in theology, neither curriculum had provided a theology that was capable of speaking to the struggle and oppression of the black community. Dr. Cone then began searching for, in his words, a "Christian theology out of the black experience of slavery, segregation, and the struggle for a just society." This would be no small feat since Christians had for generations practiced and defended not just slavery, but the hatred and demise of anything black or African.Cone's mission was to bring blackness and Christianity together.
”# In 1969, Cone published Black Theology and Black Power. In this book, Cone brought attention to racism in theology and proposes a theology addressing black issues, this theology would provide liberation and empowerment of blacks and “create a new value structures so that our understanding of blackness will not depend upon European misconceptions.”#From these convictions, the idea of black liberation theology was created. Black relate Christianity to the struggles they have endured, therefore it has to be black. “In a society where men are defined on the basis of color of the victims, proclaiming that the condition of the poor is incongruous with him who has come to liberate us.”
