Word: blacks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week blacks tried for greater in fluence within the United Church of Christ at its biennial assembly in Boston, promoting a Negro pastor for the presidency of the 2,000,000-member denomination and pressing for fuller representation on all committees. In Detroit, representatives of the National Black Economic Development Council met with the executive council of the Episcopal diocese of Michigan to present their demands for reparations for "centuries of oppression." In the long run, though, one of the most significant attempts to give spiritual sanction to the Black Power movement may have occurred last month in Atlanta...
Irrelevant Heaven. Not surprisingly, efforts to establish a spiritual underpinning for black-church militancy have strong political overtones. The Atlanta statement, for example, closed with Eldridge Cleaver's belligerent manifesto: "We shall have our manhood. Or the earth will be leveled by our efforts to gain it." It spoke of a "theology of black liberation, the affirmation of black humanity that emancipates black people from white racism, thus providing authentic freedom for both white and black people." The 16 scholars implicitly endorsed James Forman's reparations demand on white churches (TIME, May 16) by recalling St. Luke...
...attempt by blacks to construct a distinctively black theology has a strong this-worldly existentialist cast. "The idea of heaven is irrelevant for black theology," says Cone, the author of a recent book called Black Theology & Black Power. "The Christian cannot waste time contemplating the next world, if there is a next." One participant in the session, Preston N. Williams of Boston University, explained: "The black man cannot divorce theology from social action. Whites say, 'That's not theology at all.' The real question is who is going to define the norms of theology." Some Negro churchmen...
Freeing Power. Black theology views the possibility of violence calmly. "As I look at the American scene," says Bishop Johnson, "I see no possible way to change the structures of injustice except through violence. I hope my vision is wrong." The only Roman Catholic present at the meeting, Father Lawrence Lucas of Saint Joseph's Church in Harlem, draws on the "just war" tradition. "Deliberate, planned violence can be morally justified, and violence can play a role in effecting social change," he says...
...Christian baptism of violence could have tragic implications for American Negroes. The Rev. C. Shelby Rooks, executive director of the Fund for Theological Education at Princeton, unhappily notes: "A drift toward community separation, toward violence, toward the denial of our common brotherhood with white men that the Gospel proclaims." Black militants may attempt to impose the doctrine of violence on their own community, in which case Rooks predicts that "it is highly likely that there may soon be black martyrs at the hands of black people...