Abstract
Belief in divine privilege or God’s creation of a volk is fundamental a motif in the propulsion of the superiority of one race against another in the world, ipso facto , the continuous management of systems of knowledge, authority, economics, and a ‘world civilization’ now quintessentially fundamentalist and racially fascist are effects of this deeply hidden and coded belief. Apartheid simply, is a zenith of this supersessionist (replacement of Israel from the Bible with European white) world enunciated since the justification of the commodification and dispensability of black lives. To elucidate this thesis, this article first offers a presentation of Cone’s theological grammar. Second, we punctuate the value of self-criticality as an indispensable criterion by demonstrating that Cone was engaged critically in Black Theology of Liberation’s (BTL) internal discourses not only to clarify the relationship between Sunday and Saturday religiosities, but to distinguish and distance BTL from idolatrous imaginations of knowledge and history. Black faith oozes from the volcanic, rapturous explosion that dismantles the divide between Sunday and Saturday religions. Third, we make the point about the ghettoization of Cone’s theology at its gestation and by this we seek to demonstrate this continuous relegation of the school to residential alienation and nihilism in the battle of ideas. For this reason, the article argues, cracking the “Western code,” to break the coalition of black experience with the white power structure, is the space where BTL might have to dwell in the battle of ‘New Blood Rivers.’
Highlights
1.1 The ‘New Blood River’ and the Grammar of White SuperiorityDo we need to rearticulate and continue to explain Cone’s theology or continue with the struggle to restore our authority as black people which up to this day has not been restored? We desire no regurgitation of Cone’s contribution in this article, but to carry on with Cone’s spirit: “I write because writing is the way I fight
With Dwight Hopkins, Cone’s own student, in Tinyiko Maluleke’s office at University of South Africa (Unisa), in the early 2000s, we had that blissful conversation embellished with Cone and around other black theologians which abides in our memory
Gideon Khabela, another South African supervised by James Cone while at Union, would never complete our conversations on Black Theology of Liberation (BTL) without touching on Cone — especially his experiences with Cone as a supervisor and giving a window through which to peep into the personality of this giant
Summary
Do we need to rearticulate and continue to explain Cone’s theology or continue with the struggle to restore our authority as black people which up to this day has not been restored? We desire no regurgitation of Cone’s contribution in this article, but to carry on with Cone’s spirit: “I write because writing is the way I fight. The battle with weapons is over and the ‘New Blood River’ is economic competition, a blatant truth about South Africa more than two decades after political liberation This war imagery is more than rhetoric in a borderless world with its constant shifts of the battlefields, the ‘New Blood Rivers’ of the maintenance of white supremacy. ‘Closing the books of the past’ suggests authority bordering on idolatry about history, space and temporality in the white power structure It means the worship of the history of one race in the world that can close and open books of the past, present and future of the world. It is for this reason that we make a brief case for cracking the “Western code,” what Cones’ whole theology stands for and symbolizes, our last point in this article.
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