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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2025
1 Connolly, John, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression: Black Theology’s Challenge for American Catholic Theology,” Horizons 26, no. 2 (1999): CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Editor’s note for the reader: The editorial conventions for the use of uppercase and lowercase for “white” and “Black” are evolving and a matter of discussion. Horizons’s current position is to defer to the author’s preference. The reader will notice different usages throughout this roundtable.
2 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.
3 Cone, James H., God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1975), .Google Scholar
4 Dulles, Avery, “Faith and Revelation” in Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler and Galvin, P., eds., Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 1: 91–128.Google Scholar
5 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Systematic Theology: Tasks and Methods” in Fiorenza and Galvin, eds., Systematic Theology, 1: 74, 84.
6 Ibid., 79.
7 Ibid., 70.
8 Cone, James H., A Black Theology of Liberation, twentieth anniv. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), .Google Scholar
9 Cone, James H., Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury, 1969), .Google Scholar
10 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 30.
11 Ibid., 51.
12 Ibid.; see also Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 34.
13 “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; italics in original).
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 45–46.
17 Ibid., 46; the quotation within the quotation is from Black Theology and Black Power, 6.
18 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 30.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 31. In My Soul Looks Back (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), 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 (James H. Cone, “Introduction,” Part 3, “Black Theology and the Response of White Theologians” in Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979 [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979], 140). 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).
21 Ibid., 46 (Cone’s italics).
22 Ibid., 42–45.
23 Ibid., 43; Cone also mentions Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and Rudolph Bultmann as proponents of this approach to revelation.
24 Ibid., 43–44.
25 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.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 44–45.
29 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 51, 97.
30 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 44.
31 Ibid., 46.
32 Ibid.
33 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 51.
34 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.
35 Ibid., 94.
36 Cone, My Soul Looks Back, 48. 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.
37 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 83.
38 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.
39 Ibid., 205.
40 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 45.
41 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 83.
42 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 121.
43 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 83.
44 Patrick Bascio, The Failure of White Theology: A Black Theological Perspective (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 1–2.
45 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 7–8.
46 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).
47 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.
48 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 62–63.
49 Cone, “Introduction,” Part 3, 137.
50 See above, 238–39.
51 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 89-90.
52 Letter of December 13, 1993, private correspondence between Jeffrey Siker and James Cone shared by Siker with the writer.
53 Cone, “Introduction,” 135–36.
54 David J. Bosch, “Currents and Crosscurrents in South African Black Theology” in Wilmore and Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 235.
55 Avery Dulles, Revelation and the Quest for Unity (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1968). 16. 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.
56 Ibid., 178.
57 Ibid., 279.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 275–76.
60 Dulles, Avery, Models of Revelation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), .Google Scholar
61 Ibid., 29.
62 Ibid., 30.
63 Ibid. But, Dulles adds, liberation theology has made major contributions to the theology of faith and hermeneutics.
64 Dulles, Avery, The Reshaping of Catholicism: Current Challenges in the Theology of Church (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 31–32.Google Scholar
65 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.”
66 Ibid., 32.
67 Ibid. Dulles attributes the phrase, “a God-centered value system,” to Bishop James Malone.
68 Ibid., 135.
69 Ibid., 136.
70 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 Joseph Gremillion, ed., The Gospel of Peace and Justice, Documents of the Synod of Bishops, 1971 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1976), 513–29, paragraph #6.
71 Dulles, Reshaping of Catholicism, 182.
72 The text of the Hartford Appeal cited here is taken from John Neuhaus, Richard, Coffin, William Sloane Jr., and Cox, Harvey, “The Hartford Debate,” Christianity and Crisis 35/12 (July 21 , 1975): Google Scholar.
73 Ibid.
74 Dulles, Reshaping of Catholicism, 183.
75 Avery Dulles, The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System, new exp. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 32–33.
76 Ibid., 33.
77 Ibid., 84.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., 85.
80 Dulles, Avery, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), .CrossRefGoogle Scholar
81 Ibid., 158.
82 Ibid., 179.
83 Ibid.
84 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.).
85 Ibid.
86 Dulles, Models of Revelation, 267, 269.
87 Dulles, Craft of Theology, 23.
88 Kline Taylor, Mark, Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), Google Scholar. Taylor reconstructs christology according to the dynamics of “reconciliatory emancipation.”
89 Ibid., 175.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 176–81.
92 Ibid., 190.
93 Ibid., 150–51.
94 Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 46.
95 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 144.
96 Helmut Gollwitzer, “Why Black Theology?” in Wilmore and Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 165.
97 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 145.
98 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).
99 Ibid., 236.
100 Ibid., 237.
101 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 149–50.
102 Roberts, J. Deotis, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), .Google Scholar
103 Ibid., xvii, 8.
104 Ibid., ix.
105 Ibid., 7.
106 Ibid., 6, 9.
107 For Roberts, see Liberation and Reconciliation, 11. For Cone, see James H. Cone, “Epilogue: An Interpretation of the Debate among Black Theologians” in Wilmore and Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 613.
108 Ibid., 614.
109 Roberts, Reconciliation and Liberation, xii.
110 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 147.
111 Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation, ix.
112 Ibid., 9.
113 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 152.
114 Taylor, Remembering Esperanza, 59.
115 Ibid., 225.