Abstract:
Belief in divine privilege or God’s creation of a volk is fundamental a motif in the
propulsion of the superiority of one race against another in the world, ipso facto,
the continuous management of systems of knowledge, authority, economics, and a
‘world civilization’ now quintessentially fundamentalist and racially fascist are effects
of this deeply hidden and coded belief. Apartheid simply, is a zenith of this supersessionist
(replacement of Israel from the Bible with European white) world enunciated
since the justification of the commodification and dispensability of black lives. To
elucidate this thesis, this article first offers a presentation of Cone’s theological
grammar. Second, we punctuate the value of self-criticality as an indispensable criterion
by demonstrating that Cone was engaged critically in Black Theology of Liberation’s
(BTL) internal discourses not only to clarify the relationship between Sunday
and Saturday religiosities, but to distinguish and distance BTL from idolatrous
imaginations of knowledge and history. Black faith oozes from the volcanic, rapturous
explosion that dismantles the divide between Sunday and Saturday religions.
Third, we make the point about the ghettoization of Cone’s theology at its gestation
and by this we seek to demonstrate this continuous relegation of the school to residential alienation and nihilism in the battle of ideas. For this reason, the article
argues, cracking the “Western code,” to break the coalition of black experience with
the white power structure, is the space where BTL might have to dwell in the battle of
‘New Blood Rivers.’
