Obama and the Black Messiah

My friend ER has a post on his site about the diverse ways the Bible is read in a Southern Global Context. An example of that diversity of "reading" is being played out in the United States even on this day of Democratic Primary Elections in Indiana and North Carolina. Most American, who are used to hearing the rantings of many white evangelist on television and have long since grown inured to them, where startled to hear "Black" rantings coming from the pastor of the first Black man with a clear shot at the Presidency. What this , What's this they said....

Below is a thoughtful analysis of the situation from the Asian Times. It has been excerpted but the full article can be found at the citation at the end. Meanwhile check out the posting at the Erudite Rednecks as well (after you read mine of course): http://eruditeredneck.blogspot.com/2008/05/for-my-english-nonbeliever-friend-lee.html



Asian Times (On Line)
Excerpts:

The Peculiar Theology of Black Liberation

By Spengler

Senator Barack Obama ….belongs to a Christian church whose doctrine casts Jesus Christ as a "black messiah" and blacks as "the chosen people". At best, this is a radically different kind of Christianity than most Americans acknowledge; at worst it is an ethnocentric heresy. What played out last week on America's television screens was a clash of two irreconcilable cultures, the posture of "black liberation theology" and the mainstream American understanding of Christianity…..

One of the strangest dialogues in American political history ensued on March 15 when Fox News interviewed Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, of Chicago's Trinity Church. Wright asserted the authority of the "black liberation" theologians James Cone and Dwight Hopkins:
Wright: How many of Cone's books have you read? How many of Cone's book have you read? Sean Hannity: Reverend, Reverend?
Wright: How many books of Cone's have you head?
Hannity: I'm going to ask you this question ...
Wright: How many books of Dwight Hopkins have you read?
Hannity: You're very angry and defensive. I'm just trying to ask a question here.
Wright: You haven't answered - you haven't answered my question.


Hopkins is a full professor at the University of Chicago's Divinity School; Cone is now distinguished professor at New York's Union Theological Seminary. They promote a "black power" reading of Christianity, to which liberal academic establishment condescends….

Obama referred to this when he asserted in a March 14 statement, "I knew Reverend Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago." But the fact the liberal academy condescends to sponsor black liberation theology does not make it less peculiar to mainstream American Christians. Obama wants to talk about what Wright is, rather than what he says. But that way lies apolitical quicksand.

Since Christianity taught the concept of divine election to the Gentiles, every recalcitrant tribe in Christendom has rebelled against Christian universalism, insisting that it is the "Chosen People" of God - French, English, Russian, Germans and even (through the peculiar doctrine of Mormonism) certain Americans. America remains the only really Christian country in the industrial world, precisely because it transcends ethnicity. One finds ethnocentricity only in odd corners of its religious life; one of these is African-American. During the black-power heyday of the late 1960s, after the murder of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, the mentors of Wright decided that blacks were the Chosen People. James Cone, the most prominent theologian in the "black liberation" school, teaches that Jesus Christ himself is black. As he explains:

Christ is black therefore not because of some cultural or psychological need of black people, but because and only because Christ really enters into our world where the poor were despised and the black are, disclosing that he is with them enduring humiliation and pain and transforming oppressed slaves into liberating servants.

Theologically, Cone's argument is as silly as the "Aryan Christianity" popular in Nazi Germany, which claimed that Jesus was not a Jew at all but an Aryan Galilean, and that the Aryan race was the "chosen people"……

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. …….

Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.
In the black liberation theology taught by Wright, Cone and Hopkins, Jesus Christ is not for all men, but only for the oppressed…….

In this respect black liberation theology is identical in content to all the ethnocentric heresies that preceded it. Christianity has no use for the nations, a "drop of the bucket" and "dust on the scales", in the words of Isaiah. It requires that individuals turn their back on their ethnicity to be reborn into Israel in the spirit. That is much easier for Americans than for the citizens of other nations, for Americans have no ethnicity…….

In his response to Hannity, Wright genuinely seemed to believe that the authority of Cone and Hopkins, who now hold important posts at liberal theological seminaries, was sufficient to make the issue go away….…

Americans, who for the most part belong to Christian churches that preach mainstream Christian doctrine. Christianity teaches unconditional love for a God whose love for humankind is absolute; it does not teach the repudiation of a God who does not destroy our enemies on the spot. …

Obama views Wright rather at arm's length: as the New York Times reported on April 30, 2007: Reverend Wright is a child of the 60s, and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through," Mr Obama said. "He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.

Obama holds his own views close. But it seems unlikely that he would identify with the ideological fits of the black-power movement of the 1960s…..

It is possible that because of the Wright affair Obama will suffer for what he pretended to be, rather than for what he really is.


The complete article and related articles may be found at:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC18Aa01.html