"GOD OF THE OPPRESSED." (JAMES H. CONE).   Term Paper ID:28912 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines Cristology presented by the author. Position of Jesus in religious expreience.... More...

6 Pages / 1350 Words 2 sources, 13 Citations, MLA Format $24.00 Return to List of Papers

Paper Abstract: Examines Cristology presented by the author. Position of Jesus in religious expreience. Paper Introduction: This research examines the Christology presented by James H. Cone in his book God of the Oppressed. The research will provide background information on the author and then discuss his account of the figure of Christ from the standpoint of positioning where Jesus stands in the cosmology of religion, the meaning that Jesus has for modern experience, and the particular Christological emphasis that Cone identifies as most appropriate in his work. The research will conclude with a critique and evaluation of Cone's work that will be intended to place his views in the context of modern Christian thought. It may seem something of a tautology to assert that Christianity could be nothing without Christ, but the content of that statement is that Christ functions as a powerful symbol of both history and religion and that symbols are important to both relig Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. God of the Oppressed. The meaning of Jesus' death is that it was part of the pattern ofinjustice against which he had preached, and the meaning of theResurrection is that in the his divine aspect he was able to make good"God's promise to bring freedom to all who are weak and helpless" (Cone97). . must be defined according to the historical struggle of freedom. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1997.Hobbes, Thomas. The research will conclude with a critique andevaluation of Cone's work that will be intended to place his views in thecontext of modern Christian thought. Indeed, Cone says that black liberation theologians"rejected this white teaching about the meek, long-suffering Jesus,"characterizing it as "hypocritical and racist. Leviathan. It cannot be identified with the status quo (Cone 183; emphasis in original). . London: Penguin Books, 1985. The views of Christian theologians,says Cone, were defined by philosophy and other cultural values rather than by the biblical theme of God as the Liberator of the oppressed. The meaning ofthe Redemption and of Jesus' teachings must be found in the context of suchexperience, or no meaning can be found. Are the newly liberated to be prevented from,say, nature mysticism or the sense of fellowship just because they are nolonger oppressed? . It may seem something of a tautology to assert that Christianity couldbe nothing without Christ, but the content of that statement is that Christfunctions as a powerful symbol of both history and religion and thatsymbols are important to both religion because they illustrate therelationship of Christ to life and the character of the relationship ofChristians to one another and to non-Christians. The problem with stressing Jesus' suffering while not stressing thepotentiality of freedom is that it positions Christianity as an oppressorthat wants those it oppresses to suffer without resistance. Given that ordinaryexperience for the majority of black people is circumscribed by issues ofjustice and survival vis-а-vis the structures of (white) social, economic,and cultural power, liberation must become the basis of attachment to thelegitimacy of the Christian witness and message. . . However, to insist, as Cone does, that social justiceis the only viable Christian theme means that he must spend rather a gooddeal of argument discrediting any other interpretation of revelation asmeaningless for oppressed people. Thus too does it become possible to affiliate with God,i.e., to have faith, even when the weight of evidence of modern experienceis all on the side of the view that existence is a godless and joylessstranger to freedom, as well as being very much as Hobbes describes it inthe Leviathan (186): solitary, poore [sic], nasty, brutish, and short"(186). This new thing was Jesus' recognition that the dawn of the time of salvation, inaugurated by the return of the Spirit, was inseparable from his person and also that this new age was identical with the liberation of the poor and the afflicted. Our Christology focused onthe revolutionary Black Christ who 'preached good news to the poor'" (Conexvi citing Luke 4:18). In this view, the resurrection is God's demonstration that Jesus asthe risen Lord has literally overcome the finality of death, where deathitself has been an exercise in social injustice. Thus the Christologicalmission, passion, and resurrection reveal God "in history as freedom forus" (Cone 128). . Macpherson. In developing a narrative line of Jesus' biographythat is consistent with this meaning, Cone emphasizes the fact that Jesustook on the struggle for justice when he functioned as a revolutionaryteacher. The problem, as Cone sees it, was that Christiantheology misinterpreted the meaning of divine revelation because it waselitist and institutional in character. In Cone's formulation, the position of Jesus in religious experienceis to be found where it lends meaning to social experience of theoppressed. While Cone agrees with those whosay that the church as a human construct was historically late in advocacyfor the oppressed but did benefit from Enlightenment and other strands ofsocially progressive thought, he adds that nothing about the ethicalobligation to champion the oppressed was ever missing from Scripture, ifanyone cared to look. The figure of Christ,indeed, is more than a symbol of human experience (although of course it isthat), whether idealized or historicized. . This research examines the Christology presented by James H. Cone's followsthrough on the implication of suffering for empowerment and resistance: While it is true that the cross too often functions to make the oppressed accept their lot as God's will, this is not always the case. Further, the resurrection,embodied in the figure of Jesus, illustrates the power of the divine tointervene in or to lend meaning to human experience, and by extension toremain a presence in current human experience, not just a historicalartifact or a biography of an unusual man, however miraculous the story ofrising from the dead might be. Christ is bound up with humanexperience, and conceptions held of Christ have historically informed thequality of human experience, at both individual and "macro" levels. Ed. Strength in the midst of suffering and struggling for justice is thesubstance of meaning that Jesus has in the modern period, according toCone's line of thought. . . Cone inhis book God of the Oppressed. This position is to be distinguished from the view ofJesus that emphasizes his suffering but does not sufficiently stress hisfreedom leadership. . Cone's insistence that meaning in Scripture is to be found only in thetheme of God as a liberating presence in history leads to the view that anyother interpretation of the text will befoul Christian ethics, making it"at best indifferent toward the oppressed struggle of freedom" (Cone 184).Undoubtedly it can be said that advocacy against injustice is a persistenttheme of the Bible. An ethic . What that comes down to in Cone's view is that Jesus is bestunderstood a figurehead of liberation, particularly of black people.Indeed, the place of Jesus in black Christian thought cannot be divorcedfrom the black social experience, particularly in America. There are many ordinary blacks who point to Jesus' suffering as a source of empowerment in their struggle to survive with dignity in a world they did not create (Cone xvii). Positioning Jesus in the vanguard of social liberation is consistentwith Cone's description of black Christians who do not consider Jesus "as athought in their heads to be analyzed n relation to a similar thoughtcalled God," in the tradition of classical theology but rather "as a Saviorand friend" (Cone 5). . . That point is important because Cone seeks to seize Christologyand Christian ethics from theological traditions that lend ethical standingto the role of the church as institution. Works CitedCone, James H. [T]hrough his words and deeds he became the inaugurator of the Kingdom, which is bond up with his person as disclosed in his identification with the poor (Cone 68). Once the death and resurrection of Jesus are seen as a narrative oftriumph over injustice, it becomes possible for Cone to formulate "thegrounding of liberation in God's act in Jesus Christ [as] the logicalconsequence of any Christian theology that takes Scripture seriously as animportant source for the doing of theology" (Cone 128). Such a demandneedlessly desacralizes both cosmos and history, not to say the work of theredemption, and in fact calls into question whether the spirit of Godfunctions as a source of the inner strength that oppressed peoples aresupposed to derive from it. It is difficult to see, for example, whyAnselm's assertion that the human reward of Christ's redemption is "theeternal blessedness of his brethren" must be seen as "useless as a leverageagainst political oppression [because it] dehistoricizes the work ofChrist, separating it from God's liberating act in history" (Cone 211-12).Very well, but what happens to the historical relevance of Christianity ifby some miracle everybody someday wakes up liberated? According to Cone, Scripture provides the basis for emphasizing thethemes of liberation and freedom from oppression in Christologicalthinking. One feels obliged to ask, too, why it is necessary forJesus to be either liberator or the sacral source of a mystical body, whenit makes just as much sense to suggest that he could be both one and theother, and doubtless more besides. Faith in Jesus' cross inspired 5 , blacks in Montgomery (1955- 56) to boycott city buses for 381 days, risking their lives in KKK territory rather than ride in humiliation. . The research will provide backgroundinformation on the author and then discuss his account of the figure ofChrist from the standpoint of positioning where Jesus stands in thecosmology of religion, the meaning that Jesus has for modern experience,and the particular Christological emphasis that Cone identifies as mostappropriate in his work. It would be a mistake to get bogged down inwhether the resurrection "really happened"; indeed, it can be said that thesymbolic character of the resurrection must be emphasized if the notion ofChrist's relevance to today's human experience is to be preserved. C.B. The demand that Jesus Christ be conceptualized solely as a proxy forsocial liberation is just as limiting as what could be called Anselm's ideaof the holy and its formulation as spiritual community. If American theologians and ethicists had read the Scripture through the eyes of black slaves and their preachers, then they would have created a different set of ethical theories of the "Good." . Cone cites the divine apparition atthe time of Jesus' baptism to explain that the miracle of the descent ofthe Holy Spirit shows that Jesus understood "the prophetic character of hisvocation as well as the presence of something entirely new in his person"(Cone 67-8). If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.