Mulatto Bodies and the Body of Christ

The critiques of two “orthodox” Christian doctrines in chapters 1 and 2 placed alongside the explication of the African worldview, and specifically Akan anthropology, in chapter 3 offer compelling possibilities for constructive theological work for the future of Black theology and the theologies of African American Christians generally. What the previous chapters show is that indigenous African thought and traditional Protestant theology posit radically different ideas about the nature of human beings, the purpose of their creation, and how humans achieve salvation or metaphysical completion. Black theology has been critical of traditional Protestant theology for the way in which it has historically supported and condoned the oppression of black people, yet, by and large, Black theology has not radically deconstructed established Protestant approaches to theological anthropology or the exclusive Christology that, in many ways, provides theological legitimacy for this oppression. Specifically, Black theology has not provided an answer for the alienation from, even shame for, indigenous Africa prevalent among most black Christians and justified on theological grounds, although James Cone defines the goals of Black Power and Black theology as commensurate with addressing such alienation.KeywordsChristian TheologyGood DeathChristian DoctrineRelational HarmonyAfrican WorldviewThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The founders of Black theology were wrong to claim that Black Americans had never produced an important theologian. Black religious historian Joseph Washington pioneered this claim in 1964, contending that Black Christianity was a sub-Christian folk faith with no theology and no theologians. James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts took from Washington the threefold verdict that Black Protestantism is wholly different from White Protestantism, lacks any real basis in Reformation theology, and thus lacked theologians. This argument buttressed the assertion of Cone and Roberts that Black theology began with them; they had no theological predecessors. Cone became a towering figure by founding Black liberation theology, brilliantly expressing what it means to take blackness seriously on liberationist terms. His early framing argument, however, wrongly discounted Reverdy Ransom, Henry McNeal Turner, Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, and King—creative theological thinkers who thought through their blackness. They were not systematic theologians, but systematic theology is a Euro-academic enterprise, a point that Gayraud Wilmore and religious historian Charles Long pressed against Cone. Wilmore rightly implored Black theologians to stop saying that Black theology was invented in 1969, and wrongly steered three generations of students away from the Black social gospel tradition. Wilmore was Cone’s closest friend and toughest critic. He argued that Black theology should be a subordinate discipline within Black religious thought, not a normative Christian enterprise as with Cone, and that Black theology should appropriate the Black radical tradition. Dwight Hopkins, the leading second-generation Black theologian, got his bearings by fusing Cone and Wilmore.

The black theology emerged in the 20th century, recovering the experience of black communities with divinity. Following the precept of Paulo Freire that was "to say the word", black theologians assumed the need to speak from their ethnicity, from the denunciation of the racist structures of the church and society and the announcement of the black experience as a criterion for doing theology. The vitality of black communities found a fruitful space in black theological reflection, a meeting place between community knowledge and academic knowledge. In order to understand black theology in Brazil, it is necessary to rescue the social framework that serves as background for the formulation of this reflection. Knowing the history and the adventures of black people is imperative to identify continuities and discontinuities of racist policies that have been developed in Brazil.

Book Review: II. Historical-Theological Studies: Farewell to Innocence: A Socio-Ethical Study on Black Theology and Power

In this essay I will be addressing the issue of how a participative model of Black Theology has been utilised in order to assist predominantly white students training for public, authorised ministry in Britain to better understand the challenges and ethical commitments to being anti-racist Christian disciples and allies alongside their black brothers and sisters in the ‘Body of Christ’.

Our study criticizes the respective theodicies and methodologies of Joseph Washington, James Cone, and Albert Cleage. Our argument is reducible to the following propositions. (1) On the basis of their own presuppositions, the point of departure for black theology must be the question: Is God a white racist? (2) Accordingly, a viable theodicy, one which refutes the charge of divine racism, must be the foundation for the edifice of black theology. (3) The theodicies of the above theologians leave the issue of God's racism essentially unresolved. Consequently, the remainder of the theological system lacks adequate support.

Black Liberation Theology is a theology of protest against Western Christianity which traditionally preaches an irrelevant and dominating gospel. It is also a theology born out of the suffering of blacks, women and marginalized peoples. As such, liberation theology grows out of the hermeneutics of suffering. Its constant aim is to correct the debased form of the gospel message toward justice and liberation, as expounded by the oppressor. Apart from the Bible as its primary source, black liberation theology also draws upon the experience of the black community and the black church. It is a liberation theology in the sense that it strives for freedom from alienation, dehumanization and domination. It is the lived experience of people in line with their reading and understanding of Scripture, which opens up a new future for the oppressed. Within such a liberation theology, the redemptive power of Jesus Christ is generated by the oppressed for themselves and for the salvation of those who oppress. This is the faith of the suffering people.

ABSTRACTM. Shawn Copeland joins a liberationist epistemology with the conceptual framework of Bernard Lonergan to offer both a stinging critique of racism and a constructive Catholic theological anthropology. This essay examines Copeland's grounding of theological anthropology in two dimensions: the historical experience of poor women of color, and eschatological solidarity in the Mystical Body of Christ. The second major concern of this essay is the rhetoric of race in black theology and its reception among white theologians. The author, from his perspective as a white, male Catholic theologian, probes questions of white conversion, black anger, and race essentialism raised by Copeland's theology. Highlighting a tension between speaking the truth about white racism “in the master's house” and maintaining the Christian vision of “one humanity” bound by grace, the author argues that, as far as possible, the race critique must flow from a contemplative and pastoral spirit.

The Influence and Impact of Bernadette Brooten Not Only on LGBTIQ+ People in Germany Angela Standhartinger (bio) As we all know, Bernadette Brooten is an impressively polyglot person. She knows Norwegian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, French, and of course German. Actually, she is the best non-native German speaker I have ever met in my life. In preparation for this contribution, I solved the riddle of Brooten's facility: she started her career with a maxima cum laude BA in German from the University of Portland, Oregon, including one year of study in Salzburg in Austria. Immediately after, she studied theology for another two years at Tübingen in Germany before entering the PhD program at Harvard, which included a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.1 At Tübingen she became involved in the critical discussion, at that time, of the recently closed Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church and its failure, among other reforms, to begin ordaining women as priests. So her famous rediscovery of the female apostle Junia was published in the volume Women Priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration, edited by Leonard and Arlene Swidler.2 The following year, the Junia article was published in one of the premiere German publications on feminist theology, the book Frauenbefreiung (women's emancipation), edited by Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel.3 With Moltmann-Wendel and Hans Küng, Brooten developed a research project, "Women and Christianity," part of which resulted in her famous paper "Early Christian Women and Their [End Page 183] Cultural Context: Issues of Method in Historical Reconstruction."4 The German Volkswagen Foundation funded the Women and Christianity project, under the category "unconventional ideas," with 732,000 DM. From 1982 to 1984 Brooten held an academic research position at the University of Tübingen to publish in the area of "Sexualität, Ehe und Alternativen zur Ehe in den ersten vier Jarhunderten christlicher Geschichte" (sexuality, marriage, and alternatives to marriage in the first four Christian centuries). However, when she decided to focus on "Frauen, Macht und Sexualität: Röm 1,26 im Kontext" (women, power, and sexuality: Rom 1:26 in context), Hans Küng, the only chair holder in the group, saw this as a fundamental thematic change of topic. Because of this academic freedom dispute, Bernadette Brooten left Tübingen and moved to Harvard and later to Brandeis. Yet she had already initiated two political movements in Germany. One movement was the discussion of anti-Jewish patterns in Christian feminist theology. Brooten's engagement in this debate was triggered by the 1981 issue of Concilium, the international journal dedicated to critical Catholicism and perhaps the first mainline journal in Germany to publish on feminist theology.5 That same year, Brooten responded to the initial volume her paper "Jüdinnen zur Zeit Jesus" (Jewish women at the time of Jesus).6 She openly criticized the anti-Jewish stereotyping involved in constructing a feminist Jesus through a contrast with the (other) alleged patriarchal Jewish teachers and the accompanying tendentious selections of Jewish sources, in order to rescue early Christianity from patriarchy. The next year she republished most of the Concilium articles in her coedited book Women in a Men's Church, in which she included her own article and two from Jewish feminists Naomi R. Goldenberg and Judith Plaskow as well as one from Jacquelyn Grant entitled "Black Theology and Black Women."7 In so doing, [End Page 184] Brooten wrote in the foreword, she hoped to initiate a dialogue between Jewish and Christian feminists in Germany—a goal the book accomplished.8 While the German debate on anti-Judaism in feminist theology reached its high point in 1986–87, Brooten's 1981 article is still remembered as the starting point.9 One typical apologetic argument of that time was that Jesus rescued women from the patriarchal arbitrariness of Jewish men through his general prohibition of divorce. Brooten countered with extensive source work in "Konnten Frauen im Alten Judentum die Scheidung betreiben? Überlegungen zu Mk 10,11–12 and 1 Kor 7,10–11" (Did Jewish women divorce themselves from their husbands? Considerations on Mark 10:11–12 and 1 Cor 7:10–11).10...

The prophetic and angry voices of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X together revolutionized theological thinking in the African American community. Before Martin and Malcolm, black ministers and religious thinkers repeated the doctrines and mimicked the theologies they read and heard in white churches and seminaries, grateful to be allowed to worship God in an integrated sanctuary and to study theology with whites in a seminary classroom.

It was not until Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness that Black women’s experiences and modes of survival were given theological voice as a companion and/or corrective to the dominant mode of liberation found in Black Theology. This womanist response helped provide a thicker description of Black religious thought and modes of being—female and male. I explore what this expanded discourse has been used in womanist social ethics and ongoing battle that Black folk wage for our humanity.

(2000). Black Theology and Black Culture. Journal of Beliefs & Values: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 237-239.

The emergence of contextual theologies marks an empirical and hermeneutical turn in the history of twentieth century theology. On the upswing of secular emancipation and democratization movements, which triggered hermeneutic reconstructions of history and cultural renaissances, the Christian Churches of the Third World also started to free themselves from Western guardianship. Methodologically the basic structure of contextual theologies is the hermeneutical circle between text and context that has to be followed time and again facing the relevance-identity dilemma. At least three models of the reception of contextual theology can be differentiated: (1) the conservative opposition of the Evangelicals, (2) the Eurocentric position, and (3) the project of an intercultural theology. Intercultural theology explores the interconfessional, intercultural and interreligious dimensions of Christian faith. With Black theology and Minjung theology however, there were also two liberation theologies formulated by Protestant theologians from the start of the early 1970s.Keywords: contextual theologies; hermeneutical circle; intercultural theology; Minjung theology; Third World

This section presents a list of reference articles and books on Minjung theology that occur in the book A Protestant theology of passion: Korean Minjung theology revisited . With Black theology and Minjung theology however, there were also two liberation theologies formulated by Protestant theologians from the start of the early 1970s. They turned against racial discrimination in the United States as well as under the South African apartheid regime and the development dictatorship of the South Korean military respectively. In the US and in South Africa Protestants were on both sides of the conflict. In South Korea a minority of Protestant Christians was engaged in the democratization movement, while the silent majority judged interference with politics as not conforming to the gospel.Keywords: Korean Minjung theology; Protestant Christians; United States

The task of theological anthropology is a relatively new topic in the scope of categories articulated by systematic theologians. Despite this recent emergence, Christian theology has dealt with questions concerning human nature, at least in an implied sense, since the earliest inceptions of Christian postulations and discourses. David H. Kelsey maintains that theological anthropology has focused on two major guiding questions: (1) “What is it about human beings that makes it possible for them in their finitude to know the infinite God?” and (2) “What is it about human beings that makes fallenness possible in such a radical way as to as to require the kind of redemption to which Christianity witnesses?” In this article, I explore the ramifications of this second question, the nature of “fallenness,” as it has concerned black and womanist theology. These theologians have struggled to maintain a clear connectivity among what it means to be human as an individual; as part of the black community; as citizens of the wider communities of city, state, country, and world; as members of Christian churches; and as people of God. I argue that, when discussing the fallenness of the human condition, black and womanist theologians are distinctive in how their theological anthropology highlights the influence of other people, rather than original sin or personal wrongdoing, in establishing and maintaining this theological sense of fallen humanity. This article focuses on the work of four pivotal representatives of the current theological perspectives on this issue. James H. Cone is both the progenitor of black theology and still its most respected advocate.