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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2025
115 Ibid., 225.
116 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 232–52. Earlier critiques by Protestant theologians were published in other Catholic journals: John J. Carey, “Black Theology: An Appraisal of the Internal and External Issues,” Theological Studies 33, no. 4 (December 1972): 684–97, and “What We Can Learn from Black Theology,” Theological Studies 35, no. 3 (September 1974): 518–28; and Chapman, G. Clarke Jr., “American Theology in Black: James H. Cone,” Cross Currents 22, no 2 (Spring 1972): Google Scholar. African American ethicist and Harvard professor Preston Williams was invited to speak at the 1973 meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America under the rubric, “Religious and Social Aspects of Roman Catholic and Black American Relationships,” CTSA Proceedings 28 (1973): 15–30, https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ctsa/article/view/2756/2391. Williams spoke only sparingly of theology but concluded that “the Roman Church [must] take more seriously the black experience and culture … and educate more blacks to be doctors of the church,” (24). In 1974, at the request of CTSA President Richard McBrien, African American Catholic biblical scholar Joseph Nearon, SSS, prepared a preliminary report to the CTSA on black theology, and followed up at the 1975 annual meeting with a detailed presentation, “Challenge to Theology: The Situation of American Blacks,” CTSA Proceedings 30 (1975): 177–202.
117 CTSA President Walter J. Burghardt, SJ, in his 1968 presidential address challenged Catholic theologians to formulate an American theology. He positioned his remarks between “two symbols of [his] discontent … Resurrection City and the Pentagon.” For Burghardt, these were “symbols of the theological impotence of a radical failure within the CTSA—failure to produce or even initiate an American theology … a theology whose neuralgic problems arise from our soil and our people,” Walter J. Burghardt, SJ, “Presidential Address: Towards An American Theology,” CTSA Proceedings 23 (1968): 20, 21, https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ctsa/article/view/2656.
118 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Liberation Theology: Human Hope Confronts Christian History and American Power (New York: Paulist Press, 1972). Ruether spent the summer of 1965 in Mississippi working for civil rights as a Delta Ministry volunteer; later that year, she accepted a faculty position at historically black Howard University where she taught until 1976 [see Patricia LaRosa, “Finding Aid for Rosemary Radford Ruether Papers, 1954–2002,” The Archive of Women in Theological Scholarship, the Burke Library Union Theological Seminary (March 2008), https://library.columbia.edu/content/dam/libraryweb/locations/burke/fa/awts/ldpd_5632346.pdf]. Ruether’s assessment was published three years after Cone’s, Black Theology and Black Power, 50th anniversary edition (1969; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019), and two years after his A Black Theology of Liberation 50 anniversary edition (1970; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2020). Citations in this article are from the 50th anniversary editions.
119 Daniel A. Brown, review of The Way of the Black Messiah: The Hermeneutical Challenge of Black Theology as a Theology of Liberation by Theo Witvliet, Horizons 15, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 411–12.
120 Brown, review of The Way of the Black Messiah, 412.
121 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 234. See Dulles, “Faith and Revelation”; Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983).
122 Black theology is a protean global theological phenomenon that appeared almost simultaneously in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, South Africa, and the Caribbean, and manifest itself in Britain in the late 1980s. In each locale, black theology expressed distinct concerns and asserted its particularity—theologies. Yet each version took up the struggle for full emancipation, liberation, and humanization of Black peoples. From their inception these theologies interpreted the gospel of the Black Christ as the harbinger and guarantee of liberation, opposed antiblack racism in church and society, endorsed black power, and embraced black cultural and psychological consciousness.
123 Rosa Parks “had deep roots in the [Black] protest tradition.… In 1943, she joined the NAACP, became its secretary and worked in voter-registration campaigns…. She had attended one of Ella Baker’s leadership training conferences in the 1940s and had spent a week at the Highlander Folk School in 1955,” where she most likely interacted with Septima Clark (see Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, With a New Preface, 2nd ed, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 416, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppcgt.
124 Cornel West, “The Paradox of the Afro-American Rebellion,” in The 60s without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayers et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 44–59, at 46.
125 The term “black power” may have originated with minister and congressional representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who in an address at Howard University on May 29, 1966, stated that “Human rights are God given … to demand these God-given rights is to seek black power, the power to build black institutions….” Quoted in Floyd B. Barbour, ed., The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays (Boston, MA: Extending Horizons Books, 1968), 189. Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), drew national media attention to the phrase when he used it in a speech after his release from arrest during the “March Against Fear” that had been initiated by James Meredith, who was grievously wounded during his 220-mile walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1966. See also Carmichael, Stokely and Hamilton, Charles V., Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).Google Scholar
126 These three differed in their approaches to the formulation and advance of black theology. Albert Cleage Jr. (Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman) an ordained minister in the Congregational Christian Church turned Black Christian Nationalist, adopted a cultural-aesthetic approach through sermons and artistic representation. Cleage founded Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna (renamed Pan African Orthodox Christian Church), which featured in its sanctuary a mural of a Black Madonna and Child. At its unveiling, he declared: “Now we have come to the place, where we not only can conceive of the possibility, but we are convinced, upon the basis of our knowledge and historic study of all the facts that Jesus was born to a black Mary, that Jesus, the Messiah, was a black man who came to save a black nation. It would have little significance if we unveiled a black Madonna and it had no more meaning than just another picture in a church. Our unveiling of the Black Madonna is a statement of faith,” Albert Cleage Jr., The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969), 85; see also, Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), especially 237–85, 288–91. In formal theological analysis, J. Deotis Roberts centered liberation and reconciliation, developed a critique that synthesized faith and ethics, and called for the change of social systems and structural power; see his, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1971) and A Black Political Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1974).
127 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 35.
128 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, “Preface to the 1989 Edition,” xxv; italics in the original.
129 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 37.
130 Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans, 3rd rev. ed. (1973; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 163–95.
131 Cone, James, “Theology’s Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy,” Black Theology: An International Journal 2, no. 2 (2004): .CrossRefGoogle Scholar
132 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 132; italics in the original.
133 Cone, “The White Church and Black Power,” 118, in Black Theology: A Documentary History.
134 Cone, “The White Church and Black Power,” 118.
135 Cone, “The White Church and Black Power,” 119.
136 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 4.
137 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 92, 93; italics in the original.
138 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 110.
139 Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 43.
140 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 47.
141 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 47–48; italics in the original.
142 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 48.
143 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 48.
144 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 31.
145 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 31; italics in the original.
146 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 31.
147 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 67; italics in the original.
148 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 69; italics in the original.
149 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 235.
150 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 235.
151 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 247.
152 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 248.
153 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 248.
154 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 248.
155 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 248.
156 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 251.
157 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 249–50.
158 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 251.
159 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 251.
160 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 251.
161 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 252.
162 In “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” Connolly mentioned the word only once, and then he is citing Dulles (247).
163 Connolly, “Revelation as Liberation from Oppression,” 240.
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