THESE QUESTIONS ARE BASED ON THE COURSE NOTES FOR LIBERATION THEOLOGY THAT CAN BE FOUND HERE AND INCLUDE A SECTION ON BLACK THEOLOGY.
THIS TEST (AND MANY OF THE OTHERS ON THIS SITE) MAY ALSO BE OF USE TO STUDENTS FOLLOWING OTHER ADVANCED LEVEL RELIGIOUS STUDIES COURSES.
BEAR IN MIND THAT THESE TESTS ARE MEANT TO BE DIFFICULT. FOR THIS REASON THEY SHOULD BE ATTEMPTED AFTER THE AFOREMENTIONED NOTES HAVE ALREADY BEEN CAREFULLY REVISED. HAVING SAID THAT, IT IS POSSIBLE THAT ERRORS MIGHT HAVE BEEN MADE DURING THE CREATION OF THE TEST. PLEASE USE THE CONTACT FORM TO LET ME KNOW IF YOU THINK YOU HAVE SPOTTED ONE.
THE LANGUAGE USED IN ALL BLOG POSTS AND IN THE FOLLOWING TEST HAS NOT BEEN SIMPLIFIED. THIS IS BECAUSE EXPANDING YOUR PERSONAL VOCABULARY IS IMPORTANT IF YOU WISH TO ACCESS THE HIGHER GRADES AT ADVANCED LEVEL.
NOTE 1: THERE IS NEW INFORMATION IN THIS TEST AND IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU TAKE NOTE OF IT, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT IS INCLUDED IN THE FEEDBACK YOU RECEIVE ALONG WITH YOUR MARK.
NOTE 2: THIS TEST ALSO CONTAINS INFORMATION THAT IS RELEVANT TO THE SECTION ON EQUALITY IN THE SYLLABUS FOR PAPER 2 (RELIGION AND ETHICS).
FOR THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS, SCROLL DOWN TO THE END OF THIS BLOG ENTRY.
1.TRUE or FALSE? Black people were originally brought from Africa to America during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. They were forcibly transported across the Atlantic in slave ships (in which many died) and sold as slaves to work on sugar and cotton plantations in the Caribbean and the southern states of north America.
2. TRUE or FALSE? The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution effectively abolished slavery in 1840.
3. TRUE or FALSE? Christian slave owners used passages from the Bible to justify slavery.
4. TRUE or FALSE? When slave owning was legal in the USA, many white slave owners did not think that their black slaves had souls. For example, Jarena Lee was born into slavery in 1783, taken from her parents at the age of 7, and became a Christian preacher in 1804. In her preaching, she forgave all who harmed her. One white slaveholder who heard her speak changed his mind and ‘seemed to admit that coloured people had souls.’ He then went on to free Jarena and the other slaves that he owned.
5. TRUE or FALSE? Malcolm X was a powerful influence on Christian Black Theologians.
6. TRUE or FALSE? Elijah Muhammad was the founder of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X was just a spokesman for the movement.
7. TRUE or FALSE? Malcolm X stated the following: ‘This white man’s Christian religion further deceived and brainwashed this ‘Negro’ to turn the other cheek…and be humble, and to sing, and to pray, and take whatever was dished out by the devilish white man.’
8. TRUE or FALSE? Malcolm X’s reference to securing black civil rights ‘by any means necessary’ meant that he approved of offensive violence.
9. TRUE or FALSE? The story of the Jews being freed from slavery in Egypt under the leadership of Moses as described in the book of Genesis is a source of inspiration for many supporters of Black Theology.
10. TRUE or FALSE? Albert Cleage was a Christian friend of Malcolm X who argued for black nationalism and preached that Jesus was a black revolutionary.
11. Which of the following statements about James Cone’s theology is false?
a. The teaching of the Incarnation demonstrates that God is on the side of the poor and oppressed because Jesus himself came from such a background.
b. Cone’s theology of ‘blackness’ and his notion of the ‘Black Messiah’ includes the claim that Jesus could not have been white and blue eyed as he is depicted in some Christian art.
c. Like Martin Luther King Jr, Cone identifies strongly in his theology with Jesus’ pacifist teachings e.g. ‘love your enemies’, ‘turn the other cheek’.
d. For Cone, the resurrection of Jesus represents the final triumph of justice over oppression.
e. For Cone, white people needed to ask for forgiveness and ‘become black’ – i.e. identify with the oppressed and experience oppression before reconciliation could be achieved.
12. TRUE or FALSE? Cone’s theology is both contextual and dialectical in the sense that it starts with the lived experiences of black people and then seeks to find parallels in Biblical narratives with that experience. So there is an ongoing dialogue (or dialectic) taking place whenever black Christians engage with and study the Bible.
13. TRUE or FALSE? Cone’s theology has been criticised for never sufficiently acknowledging the need for black women to become liberated from both racism and sexism.
14. TRUE or FALSE? Two further criticisms of James Cone’s theology are that it encourages a victim mentality among blacks and that – with its insistence on the notion of a Black Messiah – it is too exclusivist and overlooks the universality of Jesus’ agapeistic message of ‘love of neighbour’.
15. TRUE or FALSE? An enduring strength of Cone’s theology is that it acknowledges and is critical of the economic inequalities generated by capitalism that also contribute to the problems faced by black communities, especially those facing poverty, deprivation and crime in the inner cities of the USA.
ANSWERS
- True – the earliest date I could find for the start of transportation was 1517 but the sources vary. For revision purposes, I would state that the period of slavery lasted for approximately 250 years starting in the early 17th Century.
- False – transportation ceased in approximately 1840 but the 13th Amendment was adopted in 1865.
- True – St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is one example : “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.” So even if the slaves converted to Christianity they were not allowed their freedom.
- The last sentence is false. But although the slave holder did not give up his slaves, according to Lee he did treat them better. This story is worth remembering, along with the fact that slave owners tried to use the Bible to justify slaveholding because it explains Malcolm X’s dismissal of Christianity as a white man’s faith that encourages passivity in its black converts: they should put up with slavery (and later on, racial discrimination) because they will get a better life in the next world.
- True
- False – Elijah Muhammad was the leader of the NOI when both Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali were famous members but the movement itself was founded in 1930 in Detroit by Wallace Fard (a.k.a. Fard Muhammad) who claimed to include Prophet Muhammad in his family tree and taught that all black Americans were the descendants of Muslims.
- True – according to NOI beliefs, white people are inherently evil and the product of a genetics experiment gone wrong that was carried out on the island of Patmos 6,000 years ago by an evil black scientist called Yacub.
- False – the phrase seems to suggest this but what Malcolm X appeared to be endorsing was the use of violence in self-defence.
- False – the story is inspirational because it shows that God is on the side of the oppressed and that good will eventually triumph over evil but it appears in the book of Exodus not Genesis.
- True – arguing that scripture was written by black Jews, Cleage claimed that the gospel of a black Messiah had been perverted by St Paul in his attempt to make the Christian faith more acceptable to Europeans. In his church, he installed a painting of a black Madonna holding a black baby Jesus.
- C – In actual fact Cone identified strongly with Malcolm X’s slogan ‘by any means necessary’ and the Black Power movement which did not rule out the use of violence to achieve its goals. Cone also did not regard the Jesus of history as passively meek and mild. However, Cone did not think that Martin Luther KIng Jr was passive either. As he stated in an interview, ‘‘The most common misperception about Martin King is that he was nonviolent in the sense of being passive. That is incorrect and he would have rejected it absolutely. In fact, Martin King would say that if nonviolence means being passive, he would rather advocate violence. Nonviolence for him meant direct action, not passivity in the face of violence, so the world would understand how brutal the system is upon those who are poor and weak. ” NOTE: Cone also argued that Jesus was the Black Messiah in the sense that he was symbolically, not literally black.
- True – the story of the Exodus can obviously be utilized to make sense of the historical experience of slavery. Additionally, Cone draws parallels in particular between Jesus’ crucifixion and the types of violence experienced by black Americans in the twentieth century. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the mid years of the twentieth century around 3,500 black Americans had been lynched in America – mostly in southern states. Jesus’ crucifixion, whilst done at the hands of the Roman authorities, has some similarities with a lynching. Supposedly the crowds chanted ‘crucify him, crucify him’ forcing the Roman governor Pilate to accept their demands or face a riot.Moving forward to the present, it is easy to imagine black Christians who support the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement taking comfort and inspiration from these Biblical parallels in a similar way.
- False – this is definitely true when it comes to Cone’s earlier writings (that also exclude black women’s experiences of racism and oppression at the hands of whites and members of their own communities) and so you can mention this issue. However, in his later works Cone acknowledges this failure and he takes both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X’s to task for their sexism.
- True – towards the end of his life, this is something that Martin Luther King Jr preached about as well. In this respect both Cone and King are similar to Gustavo Gutierrez in the sense that they increasingly came to see capitalist exploitation as contributing to institutional racism.