James Cone Liberation And The Christian Ethics Analysis

Liberation and the Christian Ethics Analysis
Throughout the article Liberation and the Christian Ethic by James Cone a few issues are brought to center stage, mainly issues of racism and the ethical values of liberation for the blacks. Cone briefly mentions how current Christian ethics are corrupt because the lack a basic in scripture and focus more on the ethics involved to maintain the status quo while disregarding the evidence of the moral injustice of slavery and other acts of oppression. Cone goes on to say that if one clearly and unbiasedly looks at scripture one can see how God is a God of liberation of the oppressed. He states that because white ethicists have not seen God as Savior to the poor and captured that white theologians …show more content…
My biggest problem and this article as a whole’s biggest weakness what James Cones in ability to objectively and unbiasedly present the fact of his argument. Most of his writing came across personalized and angsty. He was continuously insulting all white people as his evidence for his argument. His entire paper contains an over simplified dichotomy of good and evil. All black people are innocent sufferers of a corrupt and evil nation and all white people are evil overlords out to continually suppress the rights of others. He completely ignores the fact that many white people suffered as slaves or as poor farmers or immigrants, some were lynched and abused right alongside the blacks and while those white people may not have suffered nearly as bad as their colored counterparts they were not at fault for the oppression. But Cone see it as because they were white and slave owners were white, they were all equally at fault for the social injustice. There is a rigidity of labels that spans generations, white people born today are just as guilty in his eyes for the racism and slavery in our nation’s past as the white people alive back then. He believes the labels o oppressor and oppressed are inflexible and unchanging and that because blacks were once oppressed God will always be on their side and that everything they dues is righteous. In fact, he refuses to take allow for any blame to be placed on people of color. He at one point literally blames white people as the reason black people kill other black people. He is all too eager to play the victim and shove the blame on the oppressors of his ancestors, and he does this regardless of whether or not he was personally involved with the crime. This entire paper is an argument against slavery and about how racisms is bad and he