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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Based on a reading of James Cone's and Avery Dulles' analyses of revelation, this article raises questions about the adequacy of the American Catholic theology of revelation. In A Black Theology of Liberation, Cone criticizes contemporary American theology's understanding of revelation for not including the category of liberation from oppression in its definition of revelation. Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives defines revelation as symbolic communication, but does not include the category of liberation from oppression. Dulles' omission, in light of Cone's criticism, suggests the possibility of and the need for revising the American Catholic theology of revelation. In pursuing this question, the article begins with an examination of Cone's notion of revelation and the challenge which it presents to American Catholic theology. This is followed by an investigation of some of Dulles' other writings to consider if such a revision would be compatible with his thought. In the final section, drawing upon the works of Dulles, Mark Kline Taylor, Cone, and other black theologians, suggestions for a revision are made.
1 When I use the term American I am referring to white theology and white theologians in the United States. I am aware that Latin American liberation theology has pointed out that American includes both North and South America. However, the term North American would not accurately describe the theology that I am concerned with, since I am only speaking about theology in the United States and not Canada. Also, James Cone uses the term American to describe the U.S. white theology of revelation which he criticizes.
2 Cone, James H., God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1975), 3.Google Scholar
3 Dulles, Avery, “Faith and Revelation” in Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler and Galvin, John P., eds., Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 1: 91–128.Google Scholar
4 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, “Systematic Theology: Tasks and Methods” in Fiorenza, and Galvin, , eds., Systematic Theology, 1: 74, 84.Google Scholar
5 Ibid., 79.
6 Ibid., 70.
7 Cone, James H., A Black Theology of Liberation, twentieth anniv. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), 45.Google Scholar
8 Cone, James H., Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury, 1969), 34.Google Scholar
9 Cone, , Black Theology of Liberation, 30.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., 51.
11 Ibid.; see also Cone, , Black Theology and Black Power, 34.Google Scholar
12 “According to black theology, revelation must mean more than just divine self-disclosure. Revelation is God's self-disclosure to humankind in the context of liberation” (Cone, , Black Theology of Liberation, 45;Google Scholar italics in original).
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 45-46.
16 Ibid., 46; the quotation within the quotation is from Black Theology and Black Power, 6.
17 Cone, , Black Theology of Liberation, 30.Google Scholar
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 31. In My Soul Looks Back (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986)Google Scholar, Cone says that he is aware of the ideological danger of identifying the gospel with a historical-political movement. At first, his Barthian understanding of revelation prevented him from identifying revelation with the black struggle for liberation. But eventually, he says, he purposely decided to be provocative, that he would turn Barth “right-side-up” just as Barth himself had turned liberal theology “up-side-down.” No longer, Cone writes, would he allow “an appeal to divine revelation to camouflage God's identification with the human fight for justice” (45). In more recent statements Cone has modified his unqualified identification of revelation and black liberation. In Black Theology: A Documentary History, he says that this identification overlooked the provisional identity of God's revelation with any political movement (Cone, James H., “Introduction,” Part 3, “Black Theology and the Response of White Theologians” in Wilmore, Gayraud S. and Cone, James H., eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979 [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979], 140).Google Scholar In Black Theology of Liberation Cone admits that, in his earlier writings, he tended to focus exclusively on the oppression of blacks in the United States and had not incorporated a global analysis of oppression into his theology (xvi-xvii).
20 Ibid., 46 (Cone's italics).
21 Ibid., 42-45.
22 Ibid., 43; Cone also mentions Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and Rudolph Bultmann as proponents of this approach to revelation.
23 Ibid., 43-44.
24 Ibid., 44. Yet, later in the same chapter, Cone criticizes Bultmann for failing to include explicitly the idea of liberation in his understanding of revelation. With the exception of Bonhoeffer, Cone appears to be granting European theology more than it deserves.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 44-45.
28 Cone, , God of the Oppressed, 51, 97.Google Scholar
29 Cone, , Black Theology of Liberation, 44.Google Scholar
30 Ibid., 46.
31 Ibid.
32 Cone, , God of the Oppressed, 51.Google Scholar
33 Ibid., 52. Cone gives examples of how white theology, because of its “social a priori,” fails to ask questions important for the liberation of blacks.
34 Ibid., 94.
35 Cone, , My Soul Looks Back, 48.Google Scholar Cone adds that expecting white theologians to voluntarily make theology relevant to black people's struggle for justice is like expecting Pharaoh to voluntarily free the Israelites.
36 Cone, , Black Theology and Black Power, 83.Google Scholar
37 Ibid., 199-200. Cone makes this comment in the context of explaining how the exclusion of the theme of liberation from oppression in American theology has adversely affected Christian ethics.
38 Ibid., 205.
39 Cone, , Black Theology of Liberation, 45.Google Scholar
40 Cone, , God of the Oppressed, 83.Google Scholar
41 Cone, , Black Theology and Black Power, 121.Google Scholar
42 Cone, , God of the Oppressed, 83.Google Scholar
43 Baseio, Patrick, The Failure of White Theology: A Black Theological Perspective (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 1–2.Google Scholar
44 Cone, , Black Theology of Liberation, 7–8.Google Scholar
45 Ibid., 20, 97, 122. Cone is a little ambiguous on this point in this work. At times he seems to suggest that whites can overcome their “whiteness.” At other times, he says that it is almost impossible for whites to overcome their “whiteness.” But then he adds that if it can be accomplished at all, it will be the work of God's grace, and not the result of human effort alone (ibid., 64, 65-66).
46 The antibiblical and unchristian charges are found in Black Theology of Liberation, 45 and 9 respectively. The antichrist criticism is found in God of the Oppressed, 83.
47 Cone, , Black Theology of Liberation, 62–63.Google Scholar
48 Cone, , “Introduction,” Part 3,137.Google Scholar
49 See above, 238-39.
50 Cone, , Black Theology and Black Power, 89–90.Google Scholar
51 Letter of December 13, 1993, private correspondence between Jeffrey Siker and James Cone shared by Siker with the writer.
52 Cone, , “Introduction,” 135–36.Google Scholar
53 Bosch, David J., “Currents and Crosscurrents in South African Black Theology” in Wilmore, and Cone, , eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 235.Google Scholar
54 Dulles, Avery, Revelation and the Quest for Unity (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1968), 16.Google Scholar My impression is that the essays in this book are not all well focused on this theme, and, in the book, Dulles never really presents a systematic treatment of an ecumenical theology of revelation.
55 Ibid., 178.
56 Ibid., 279.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 275-76.
59 Dulles, Avery, Models of Revelation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 114, 128–41.Google Scholar
60 Ibid., 29.
61 Ibid., 30.
62 Ibid. But, Dulles adds, liberation theology has made major contributions to the theology of faith and hermeneutics.
63 Dulles, Avery, The Reshaping of Catholicism: Current Challenges in the Theology of Church (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 31–32.Google Scholar
64 Ibid., 20. Dulles also states on the same page, “Whoever does not accept all ten of these principles, I contend, cannot honestly claim to have accepted the results of Vatican II.”
65 Ibid., 32.
66 Ibid. Dulles attributes the phrase, “a God-centered value system,” to Bishop James Malone.
67 Ibid., 135.
68 Ibid., 136.
69 Ibid., 167. Dulles quotes Gaudium et Spes, 4 as support for this statement. He also quotes the following statement from the 1971 Synod of Bishops as support for this position, “Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church's mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.” The original source for this quotation is “Justice in the World” in Gremillion, Joseph, ed., The Gospel of Peace and Justice, Documents of the Synod of Bishops, 1971 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1976), 513–29, paragraph #6.Google Scholar
70 Dulles, , Reshaping of Catholicism, 182.Google Scholar
71 The text of the Hartford Appeal cited here is taken from Neuhaus, Richard John, Coffin, William Sloane Jr., and Cox, Harvey, “The Hartford Debate,” Christianity and Crisis 35/12 (07 21, 1975): 169.Google Scholar
72 Ibid.
73 Dulles, , Reshaping of Catholicism, 183.Google Scholar
74 Dulles, Avery, The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System, new exp. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 32–33.Google Scholar
75 Ibid., 33.
76 Ibid., 84.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 85.
79 Dulles, Avery, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 179.Google Scholar
80 Ibid., 158.
81 Ibid., 179.
82 Ibid.
83 Dulles writes: “Christian believers can disagree among themselves about whether capitalism, as portrayed form a Latin American liberationist perspective, is the cause of poverty and misery” (ibid.).
84 Ibid.
85 Dulles, , Models of Revelation, 267, 269.Google Scholar
86 Dulles, , Craft of Theology, 23.Google Scholar
87 Taylor, Mark Kline, Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 150–51.Google Scholar Taylor reconstructs christology according to the dynamics of “reconciliatory emancipation.”
88 Ibid., 175.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., 176-81.
91 Ibid., 190.
92 Ibid., 150-51.
93 Cone, , Black Theology of Liberation, 46.Google Scholar
94 Cone, , Black Theology and Black Power, 144.Google Scholar
95 Gollwitzer, Helmut, “Why Black Theology?” in Wilmore, and Cone, , eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 165.Google Scholar
96 Cone, , Black Theology and Black Power, 145.Google Scholar
97 Ibid., 146. Cone thinks that for blacks to speak of reconciliation with whites before all blacks are liberated plays into the hands of white oppressors. As a result, Cone thinks that Roberts' talk about reconciliation between blacks and whites is premature and allows whites to set the agenda for both the Christian understanding of reconciliation and the strategy for the liberation of blacks (Cone, , God of the Oppressed, 240, 243).Google Scholar
98 Ibid., 236.
99 Ibid., 237.
100 Cone, , Black Theology and Black Power, 149–50.Google Scholar
101 Roberts, J. Deotis, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), xiv.Google Scholar
102 Ibid., xvii, 8.
103 Ibid., ix.
104 Ibld., 7.
105 Ibid., 6, 9.
106 For Roberts, , see Liberation and Reconciliation, 11.Google Scholar For Cone, , see Cone, James H., “Epilogue: An Interpretation of the Debate among Black Theologians” in Wilmore, and Cone, , eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 613.Google Scholar
107 Ibid., 614.
108 Roberts, , Reconciliation and Liberation, xii.Google Scholar
109 Cone, , Black Theology and Black Power, 147.Google Scholar
110 Roberts, , Liberation and Reconciliation, ix.Google Scholar
111 Ibid., 9.
112 Cone, , God of the Oppressed, 152.Google Scholar
113 Taylor, , Remembering Esperanza, 59.Google Scholar
114 Ibid., 225.