Contextualization Bibliography
(Scott Moreau)

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Theologies: Western Minorities

Biblio Format Annotation
Cone, James H. "Black Theology and the Black Church: Where Do We Go from Here?" In Mission Trends No. 4: Liberation Theologies in North America and Europe, ed. Gerald Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky, 131-44. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979. In this essay Cone discusses the need "to open up the reality of black church experience and its revolutionary potential to a world context." Being "sensitive to the complexity of the world situation," he says, means for the process of liberation that "our starting point in terms of racism is not negated but enhanced when connected with imperialism and sexism." Cone sums up: "We must create a global vision of human liberation and include in it the distinctive contribution of the black experience. We have been struggling for nearly 400 years! What that experience taught us that would be useful in the creation of a new historical future for all oppressed peoples? And what can others teach us from their historical experience in the struggle for justice? This is the issue that black theology needs to address." Reprinted from the summer 1977 issue of Cross-Currents.
Cone, James H. "Black Theology from a Historical Perspective." Bangalore Theological Forum 22:2 (June 1990): 1-25. Explains North American black theology to an Indian audience. In this essay, Cone analyzes black religious thought in the light of DuBois' "warring ideals" that emerged out of the struggle for justice--beginning with its origin in slavery and concentrating mainly on its 20th century development in the civil rights and black power movements, culminating with. the rise of black theology.
Cone, James H. "Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Theology, and the Black Church." AME Zion Quarterly Review 98:2 (1986): 2-17. During a decade of writing and teaching black theology, the most frequent question that has been addressed to me, publically and privately, by black and especially whites, has been: "How do you reconcile the separatist and violent orientation of black theology with Martin Luther King's emphasis on integration, love, and nonviolence?" I have always found it difficult to respond to this question because those who ask it seem unaware of the interrelation between King, black theology, and the black church. Although it is not my primary intention to compare King and black theology, I do hope that an explication of his theology in the context of the black church will show, for those interested in a comparison, that black theology and King are not nearly as far apart as some persons might be inclined to think.
Cone, James. "What is Christian Theology?" In Toward Theology in an Australian Context, ed. Victor C. Hayes, 9-17. Bedford Park, S. Australia: Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1979. Theology is language about God. Christian theology is language about God's liberating activity in the world on behalf of the freedom of the oppressed. Any talk about God that fails to make God's liberation of the oppressed its starting point is not Christian. It may be philosophical and have some relation to scripture, but it is not Christian. For the word "Christian" connects theology inseparably to God's will to set the captives free. I realize that this understanding of theology and Christianity is not the central view of the western theological tradition and neither is it the dominant viewpoint of contemporary Euro-American theology. However, truth ought not to be defined by the majority or by the dominant intellectual interest of university academicians. The purpose of this essay is to examine the theological presuppositions that underlie the claim that Christian theology is language about God's liberation of the victim from social and political oppression.
Cox, Harvey. "The Religion of Ordinary People: Toward a North American Minjung Theology." In An Emerging Theology in World Perspective: Commentary on Korean Minjung Theology, ed. Jung Y. Lee, 109-114. Mystic, CN: Twenty-Third Publications, 1988. When one looks at minjung and the various liberation theologies from the angle of Western academic theology, one sees that they raise enormously critical issues for the next decades of Christian theology. The fact is that the demographic center of Christianity is rapidly shifting to the black, brown, yellow, poor southern hemisphere. This means that our millennium-long habit of thinking of Christianity as being somehow centered in Europe, with branch offices around the world, is dying. It will not be that way anymore and, frankly put, many of the churches in the Third World think of this movement away from European thought patterns as a great liberation. They rejoice that they no longer need to think like little Europeans in order to become Christian theologians. So the "De-Europeanizing" of Christianity is one of the things at stake in the emergence of minjung theology. What does the gospel look like when it's been unwrapped from its northern, European shell and allowed to take root and flower in a quite other culture? Concludes: We surely have minjung faith in the USA, but we do not yet have a real minjung "theology." We lack it in part because of the religious and political isolation within which most of our theologians work. If we can begin to break down that isolation, to learn from the trust in Jesus of the black churches, the Dostoyevskian passion of the Russian believers, and other expressions of minjung faith, then something quite significant could begin to happen.
Cummings, George. "Who Do You Say That I Am? A North American Minority Answer to the Christological Question." In Sharing Jesus in the Two Thirds World: Evangelical Christologies from the Contexts of Poverty, Powerlessness, and Religious Pluralism, ed. Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden, 217-36. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984. Christological reflection in the early church arose as the early church attempted to discern the meaning of Jesus Christ for their lives. Any contemporary attempt to do Christological reflection must consider the biblical record, the dogmas of the historical churches, and the living presence of Jesus Christ in the lives of Christians as Christology. Black and Hispanic-American Christians have come to understand that Jesus Christ is the one who, delivers them from all oppression-spiritual, social, political, economical, and cultural. They understand the fundamental message of the gospel to be that the God of freedom has acted on their behalf, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Any overemphasis on any one aspect of Jesus Christ distorts the gospel. Christology is, therefore, challenged to be holistically true to Jesus Christ.
Deloria, Vine. "A Native American Perspective on Liberation." In Mission Trends No. 4: Liberation Theologies in North America and Europe, ed. Gerald Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky, 277-82. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979. Arguing that "liberation theology is simply the latest gimmick to keep minority groups circling the wagons with the vain hope that they can eliminate the oppression that surrounds them," Sioux Indian Vine Deloria, Jr., charges that liberation theology ," does not seek to destroy the roots of oppression, but merely to "change the manner in which oppression manifests itself." The 'problem, according to Deloria, is "a general attitude toward the world that underlies the Western approach to human knowledge. What is needed, he proposes, is "the destruction of the whole complex of Western theories of knowledge and the construction of a new and more comprehensive synthesis of human knowledge and experience.... Then we are speaking truly of liberation. For it is the manner in which people conceive reality that motivates them to behave in certain ways." Deloria illustrates his thesis with an old Indian saying--"The white man ... has ideas; Indians have visions. Ideas have a single dimension. . . . The vision, on the other hand, presents a whole picture of experience and has a central meaning that stands on its own feet as an independent revelation." His article is taken from the July 1977 Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research.
Edwards, Herbert O. "Black Theology and Liberation Theology." In Theology in the Americas, ed. by Sergio Torres and John Eagleson, 177-91. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976. The historical experiences of different groups tend to create within them different perspectives, both on their history and the history of other groups, and in regard to the structural arrangements of the political and socio-economic orders. The black experience in America differs from the white experience; the black experience in America differs from the Latin American experience. We must address some of these differences momentarily. Suffice it to say at the moment that some of the issues as well as the options facing black theology differ in many ways from those facing liberation theology in Latin America.
Elizondo, Virgil. "Toward an American-Hispanic Theology of Liberation in the U.S.A." In Irruption of the Third World: Challenge to Theology, ed. Virginia Fabella and Sergio Torres, 50-55. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983. There are two major underlying problems facing our Hispanic church communities. One comes from the unquestioned acceptance of capitalism as the only or the best economic system. Many of our people come to the United States seeking a higher standard of living and to them it is unquestionably what the U.S. free-enterprise system has made possible. The other problem arose in the classical nineteenth-century Latin American liberal school of thought that believes it has to reject everything religious if a people is to be set free. This thought is very strong among our Chicano intellectuals, university students, and the militants in liberation movements. Because in the past the church was almost always in league with the oppressor, they feel that they have to eliminate the church and everything religious for their people ever to find integral human liberation.
Featherstone, Rudolf R. "The Theology of the Cross: The Perspective of an African in America." In Theology and the Black Experience: The Lutheran Heritage Interpreted by African and African-American Theologians, ed. Albert Pero and Ambrose Moyo, 42-55. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988. Sensitive to that which has been alluded to up to this point, what can we say? The theology of the cross is a theology which does and should continue to challenge the church. In the spirit of Luther, it speaks of a unique way of engaging the theological enterprise. The cross is the litmus test as to the veracity or lack thereof regarding theology. Faith and cross are integrally related and are, therefore, different sides of the same coin. Yet, for those who stand in the Christian faith tradition but do so with their backs against the wall, the theology of the cross, as so frequently articulated, creates some tension. Black suffering and the theology of the cross challenge the Lutheran church 1) in any interpretation that remains exclusively personal; 2) to move beyond orthodoxy and become more concerned with orthopraxis; 3) to recognize God's work in America has been and is hidden/revealed; 4) to become one with those whose backs are to the wall; 5) to view suffering as a call to faith; and 6) to realize that theology's word about the cross and suffering must be ever open to critique.
Hayes, Diana L. "Emerging Voices, Emerging Challenges: An American Contextual Theology." In Theology Toward the Third Millennium: Theological Issues for the Twenty-first Century, ed. David G. Schultenover, 41-59. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991. Hayes, a Black theologian, argues the need for the Catholic Church to develop an authentic American "contextual theology" that will recognize the voices of the once silent and invisible members of the Church. These voices, now emerging, are challenging the Church, to live up to its teachings, especially those that proclaim the unassailable dignity belonging to all who have been created in God's image.
House, H. Wayne. "An Investigation of Black Liberation Theology." Bibliotheca Sacra 139:554 (April-June 1982): 159-176. Black liberation theology critiqued from a conservative evangelical perspective.
Hoyt, Thomas. "Christology and the African-American Pilgrimage." In Christology in Dialogue, Robert F. Berkey and Sarah A. Edwards, eds. 292-307. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1993. The question of whether Jesus was Black in a literal, ontological, or generic sense has been cogently argued by Albert Cleage, James Cone, and J. Deotis Roberts, Sr., respectively. We will be concerned here with two scholars' interpretations of Jesus Christ. Consequently, this discussion will revolve around not only who Jesus the Christ is for African-American theologians, but what this Christ does for the salvation of an oppressed people. Such concerns will be consistent with the general purpose and history of Christological debate. A brief review of the American experience of African Americans suggests how that experience has helped condition the explication of the Jesus Christ event.
Kato, Byang H. "An Evaluation of Black Theology." Bibliotheca Sacra 133:531 (July-Sept. 1976): 243-252. An African evangelical's perspective on North American black theology.
Kato, Byang H. "Black Theology and African Theology." Evangelical Review of Theology 1:1 (October 1977): 35-48. Comparison of North American black theology with African theology and critique of both from a conservative evangelical perspective.
Nieto, Leo D. "Toward a Chicano Theology of Liberation." In Mission Trends No. 4: Liberation Theologies in North America and Europe, ed. Gerald Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky, 277-82. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979. "The outstanding reality for Chicanos and other ethnic. minority groups in the United States," according to Nieto, "is that we are basically an oppressed people and that we, therefore, form a part of the Third World living within the bowels of the First World." Nieto proposes that "a theological statement peculiar to the Chicano experience ... will of necessity be similar in its main lines to other theologies of liberation." After establishing four criteria or guidelines for this task, he offers "a first attempt at such a statement of a Chicano theology of liberation." Nieto's statement, part of a longer article, first appeared in the Fall 1975 issue of the Perkins Journal.
Pero, Albert. "Worship and Theology in the Black Context." In Theology and the Black Experience: The Lutheran Heritage Interpreted by African and African-American Theologians, ed. Albert Pero and Ambrose Moyo, 227-48. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988. Worship and theology are contextual, that is, they are shaped by the context within which they emerge. In America there are many factors that contribute to their contextuality; racial, ethnic, and sexual, to name a few. In this essay I will attempt to investigate and discover ways in which the Christian in a pluralistic society may come to affirm and participate in varied contextual forms of worship. Although the African-American experience with liberation theology will be the paradigm used, readers are encouraged to investigate the contextual arenas that are of primary interest to them.
Sano, Roy I. "Ethnic Liberation Theology: Neo-Orthodoxy Reshaped--or Replaced?" In Mission Trends No. 4: Liberation Theologies in North America and Europe, ed. Gerald Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky, 247-58. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979. Sano, provides a study in practical hermeneutics. He explains why Asian Americans and other ethnic minorities try "to make better sense of our experiences" by identifying with the ethnic particularism in the story of Esther, rather than the cultural assimilation in the story of Ruth. Ethnic theologies of liberation also find in Scripture that the apocalyptic writers are more helpful to their cause than the prophets. Finally, Sano contends that "ethnic theologies of liberation place a priority on liberation rather than reconciliation. Theologically speaking, this means redemption comes before reconciliation." These emphases demonstrate "what has become outdated in neo-orthodoxy," and how ethnic theologies of liberation are moving beyond it. His essay is reprinted from the November 10, 1975 issue of Christianity and Crisis.
Smith, Luther E. "Black Theology and Religious Experience." Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 8 (1980): 59-72. Discerning the structures, dynamics, and effects of systems is a complex and complicated endeavor, but the same is true for religious experience. It too requires considerable explication in order to resource a liberation consciousness. The nature and meaning of religious experience cannot be assumed; the disciplines of Christian spirituality cannot be ignored. And cursory comments will not suffice for revealing their central place in Christian faith and life. If Black Theology is to inform the liberation of black people, employing the full testimony of Christian faith, more writing and discourse will have to interpret the significance of religious experience and spiritual development to liberation.
Wilmore, Gayraud. "Black Theology: Its Significance for Christian Mission Today." International Review of Mission 63:250 (April 1974): 211-31. Defines and explains issues in Black Theology, especially the need for its focus on liberation themes: It is a basically polemical theology, because the main stream of theology in Europe and North America has not been about liberation, but about personal salvation and the rationalization of oppression. Concludes that Black Theology helps the whole church to unbind the churches of the Third World from their acquiescence to white theologies of domination. It helps to unfreeze the material and spiritual resources of the world Christian church for service wherever people languish under the oppression of the proud and affluent Western Christian civilization which has largely failed to bring health and healing to parts of the world that have lain in misery and deprivation much too long.
Wilmore, Gayraud S. "The New Context of Black Theology in the United States." In Mission Trends No. 4: Liberation Theologies in North America and Europe, ed. Gerald Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky, 113-122. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979. While still concerned with racist oppression, Gayraud S. Wilmore observes that recent statements and activities of black theologians "seem to point in the direction of a less exclusive introspective obsession with the American race problem than was characteristic of the earliest development of Black Theology. The black-white dichotomy shows signs of breaking up, yielding to a widening perspective on human oppression which recognizes the importance of the class and cultural analyses of other theologians-especially the Latin Americans." "Black Theology today makes room in its formulations for an understanding of liberation that includes the contributions of Native American, Hispanic, Asian, and white brothers and sisters in struggle for the humanity made possible for all by the cross of Christ." Wilmore believes that ethnic theologies "open the way for American churches to better understand indigenous theologies in the Third World and make an important contribution to the internationalization of the mission of American Christianity."