Difficult Days for Rome’s Apologists, the Words of James Cone, Unvarnished

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White and we are here on a Monday. It's a holiday week, of course, so the schedule's all messed up. And we initially were going to do this at three.

That's because I had, well, I had my car in the shop. Regular maintenance, and you never know. You never, never, never know. Actually, they got done quite quickly, so we were able to get in and get things set up faster.

And so it's easier on everybody to get this done rather than put it later in the day. So here we are, and we'll be back again tomorrow, and that'll be it for the week. Hopefully, for those of you in the American audience, you will have a wonderful Thanksgiving Day on Thursday, very late in the season for us.

Most of us have already, you know, been doing the Christmas music for a long time anyway, so. And it's so late. I mean, it's almost December, so it's sort of like... But anyway, we're going to be looking forward to a very unusual Thanksgiving for us.

You know, our kids are gone, and they're not in the state. And so we're actually getting together with folks from Apologia, and we're making some, going to try to make some of my dad's dressing. It's hard to do.

We've come close. We've come close. You can testify. Oh, man. Rich, many, many, many, many moons ago, Rich got to experience the white family dressing. Yeah, no, bar none. There's no question about it.

It's the best I've ever had. There's no comparison. Nope. And I mean, it took him decades to perfect it, and so, and I have not perfected it again, unfortunately. So it's one of those dying, the knowledge of it is dying away.

But we can come close. We come fairly close. On the way home last night, we gave my dad a call when Kelly was talking to him. Now, which brand of this do you use? And which, you know, just, we're trying, you know, to do everything we can.

So we're feeling a little pressure, because the only thing we were asked to bring, and because Jeff's never had my dad's dressing, obviously. And so it's sort of like, I heard about this dressing, and I'm sure it's probably from Summer.

I'm sure Summer mentioned it. And so we're feeling a little bit of pressure on, as far as Thursday goes. So anyway, everyone always says that they skip over the first few minutes of the program because, you know, because we're humans and unlike, you know, some people out there.

When you think back over the 1990s and this ministry, the primary, I think the primary thing that comes to mind, other than, you know, we were regularly going to Salt Lake City, regularly going out to the Easter pageant, continued doing work with Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses, things like that.

But we had begun the early 1990s. Well, really, you know, August of 1990, the first moderated public debate, Gerry Matitick's Long Beach. And that grew into the Great Debate series on Long Island. And so we were doing a lot of work with the subject of Roman Catholicism.

And we don't talk about it as much anymore as we once did. But those debates are still out there, and they're still extremely relevant. But Pope Francis has changed everything. You know, you look at the size and the monetary value of Catholic Answers today, for example, one of the largest Catholic apologetics organizations in the United States, the largest, I'm sure.

And I don't hear much about them doing debates anymore. And we tried to set up a debate. It was so weird. Tim Staples and I were in the same city on the same weekend. And there were lots of people on both sides that wanted to debate, and it didn't happen.

And it was Sydney, Australia, just a few weeks ago. He had agreed to do it, and then they decided not to. Why? We don't know. We don't know. I think this represents the reality that in the late 1980s, when Catholic Answers started, this was a great way to get people excited.

And certainly, when people like Jerry Matitix are running around beating up on fundamentalists, which wasn't difficult to do since they didn't know anything about Church history and so on and so forth, that got a lot of energy going.

But not only has Catholic Answers changed, but I think society has changed. And I think they're rolling with it. In other words, I think they recognize that for a lot of people, debate is just so... I don't know.

That assumes there's objective truth. Well, yeah, that's right. Well, and Roman Catholicism is supposed to assume that as well. I just don't know how Roman Catholic apologists can function today with Pope Francis.

I mean, when we first started debating the subject of Roman Catholicism over and over and over again, you'd hear, you people are so divided, you've got all these different perspectives, you've got all these problems, and we have the Pope that can tell us what we need to believe.

You don't hear much of that anymore. I've certainly noticed the difference. What I'm hearing a whole lot more of now is appeals to the ancient tradition of the Church or settled doctrines that no one can change.

It's almost become a sola scriptura ecclesia mixture type thing, where instead of just scriptura, now you have sola old tradition, something along those lines. And you just, you can't point to Francis and go, there's what I believe, because it might be different tomorrow and everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it. So it's interesting. I had seen an article a few days ago. I think it was sent to me, actually. And there's a quote from Ross Douthat based on an interview he did with Cardinal Raymond Burke.

And just listen to what's here. And I realize a lot of you, if you have not gone back and listened or watched any of the Roman Catholic debates, had somebody on Twitter just today say that they were working through the Great Debate series from Long Island, and they had gotten the fourth one and said, I just couldn't finish it.

Your opponent was just so rude. And I was like, well, sorry, I don't remember the numbers specifically, but I could guess. Was that with Bob St. Genes? And he said, yeah. And I said, yeah, yeah, okay.

I said, Bob's as cuddly as sandpaper. But anyway, if you have at any point attempted to engage Roman Catholics in conversation, especially those who have listened to, become enamored with, studied with Catholic Answers or St. Joseph's Catholic Communications or whatever else, you know that their default is to attack the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

They have to, because they have a positive claim of authority within the Roman Catholic hierarchy that they're attempting to establish. And so they have to attack the sufficiency of Scripture to be able to do these things.

And so, if you recognize the issues that are inherent in the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, that Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith, that we're not saying that there are not other rules of faith, we're not saying that you don't learn from early church fathers or learn from councils or whatever else it might be, that the point is that the ultimate authority for the Christian Church is that which is theanustas, it is God-breathed, and everything else has to be examined in light of that.

And when we examine Roman Catholicism in the light of Scripture, it fails that examination. But you know that inherent in Rome's denial of Sola Scriptura, Patrick Madrid's long, long-standing claim that Sola Scriptura results in chaos, in theological and doctrinal chaos.

Well, Rome is in theological and doctrinal chaos. People are actually talking about schism right now. They're talking about the Church splitting. And so you're not hearing much of the Roman Catholics beating that drum right now, because that drum is busted.

There's nothing to beat on. And the Roman Catholics know it. So listen to this. But you can also see in my conversation with the Cardinal how hard it is to sustain a Catholicism that is orthodox against the Pope.

For instance, Burke himself brought up a hypothetical scenario where Francis endorses a document that includes what the Cardinal considers heresy. And people say, if you don't accept that, you'll be in schism, Burke said, when my point would be that the document is schismatic.

I'm not. But this implies that, in effect, the Pope could lead a schism, even though schism, by definition, involves breaking with the Pope. This is an idea that several conservative Catholic theologians have brought up recently.

It does not become more persuasive with elaboration, and Burke himself acknowledges as much. It would be a total contradiction with no precedent or explanation in Church law. I mean, aside from the Reformation.

The pull of such ideas, though, explains why you need only take a step beyond Burke's position to end up as a kind of de facto sedevacantist, a believer that the Pope is not really the Pope, or alternatively, that the Church is so corrupted and compromised by modernity that the Pope might technically still be Pope, but his authority doesn't matter anymore.

This is the flavor of a lot of very online traditionalism, and it's hard to see how it wouldn't eventually lead many of its adherents to a separation from the larger Church, joining the traditionalist quasi-exile pioneered after Vatican II by the Society of St. Pius X.

Are there alternatives to Burke's tenuous position or the schismatic plunge? At the moment, there are two. And this is, by the way, stopping quoting for a second, this is where Roman Catholic apologists are stuck.

This is, every morning they get up, and I think, I think the first thought in their mind is, was that all a dream? Can we go back to the good old days where, you know, was that all? And then it's like, oh no, it wasn't.

Ah, what's he going to say today? So I think this is where they're stuck. So listen, one, so there's two options here. One is a conservative Catholicism that strains more mightily than Burke to interpret all of Francis's moves in continuity with his predecessors while arguing that the Pope's liberalizing allies and appointees are somehow misinterpreting him.

This was the default conservative position early in the Francis pontificate. It has since become more difficult to sustain. I'm not trying to mock these poor folks, but at the same time, we've been saying for a long time, you missed the boat a long time ago.

We've been explaining where you missed it a long time ago. And if this guy hasn't shown it to you, you know, you got a more difficult to stay. You mean it's impossible. You, you, you cannot take this man and his words and say that what he believes is what has been believed.

We don't, we can go, we can stay within the past 150 years of Popes and the contradictions are everywhere. I mean, you, you guys know this. You're smart guys. You know where this guy is coming from and you know what's happened.

It's not difficult to sustain. It's impossible to sustain, but it persists in the hope of a kind of snapping back moment when Francis or a successor decides that Catholic bishops in countries like Germany are pushing things too far.

At which point there can be a kind of restoration of the St. or John Paul II era battle lines with the papacy, despite Francis's experiments, reinterpreting, reinterpreted to have always been on the side of orthodoxy.

Another alternative is a conservatism that simply resolves the apparent conflict between tradition and papal power in the favor of the latter, submitting its private judgment to papal authority in 19th century style.

Even if that submission requires accepting shifts on sex, marriage, celibacy, and other issues that look awfully like the sort of liberal Protestantism that the 19th century Popes opposed. And this accomplishes exactly what?

All of it, all of it is intellectual and, and integrity suicide. That, that's what it all is. This would be a conservatism of structure more than doctrine as suggested by the title of a website that champions its approach where Peter is.

But it would still need for its long-term coherence and account of how doctrine can and cannot change beyond just papal fiat. So it too awaits clarification that this papacy has conspicuously not supplied.

Douthat appears not to be satisfied with any of these outcomes, and he's right not to be. It is very, very difficult to square any kind of Catholic orthodoxy with being on the other side of this or any Pope.

On the other hand, Catholic orthodoxy, as I understand it, is not coterminous with whatever the Pope says, and Francis has said some things that are pretty far out there. Say nothing of Pachamama, about which Father Dwight Lungenacker has some troubling thoughts about the future.

That's another subject we haven't gotten into. Oh yeah, okay, the plain fact is, a Pope like Francis was not supposed to happen. Everybody knows that there have been bad Popes, most notoriously the Popes of the Renaissance, in particular Alexander VI de Borgia.

The Borgia Popes. But it has also been the case that however personally corrupt they might have been, they did not change Catholic doctrine. No one argues seriously that Francis is personally corrupt, but there is certainly reason to believe that he is either changing doctrine, either de facto or indirectly, by virtue of change in disciplines of the Church, and allowing disfavored doctrines to wither on the vine.

There's just absolutely no question about any of these things, and the reality is, and this article was called, What About the Protestant Catholics? You know, we've been out here for a long time going there's a solution to this, and it is to recognize that the Church of Christ listens to the voice of found in the scriptures.

And the reality is that those who actually practice sola scriptura have a significantly greater amount of unity than Rome did under John Paul II, and certainly more than Rome does under Francis. So sola scriptura has been our battle cry.

We have sought to defend it against the constant canards and misrepresentations. It would be nice, I would, you know, we certainly know of many Roman Catholics who have come out of Roman Catholicism, found the gospel, found the truth over the years in which we have been ministering in this area.

Obviously, our prayer should be that during this time when Pope Francis is so obviously outside the realm of orthodoxy, that those within the Roman communion who begin to recognize that their entire position has been built upon sand, will providentially be led to those debates and those presentations and those books where we've laid out the case for true sola scriptura, true adherence to the sufficiency of scripture, and that they will be able to find the truth in light of that situation.

But it can't be easy. It just cannot be easy, and I think one of the reasons that we are not seeing an interest in having the debates that we did in the past is they're reeling right now. And when Francis is gone, there could be a greater crisis, because how the next, how his successor chooses, what direction he chooses to go.

Because I've been hearing Francis has been packing the cardinals with his type of people, and if that's the case, if the successor pushes even farther than Francis, I don't see how you could have any buttischism.

I really don't. I just don't see how anything else can happen. Which is interesting, because the other group that we have spent so much time with over the years is in somewhat of a similar situation, not that you have a conservative prophet of the Mormon Church.

The problem is that the succession methodology that has been developed within Mormonism is non-functional. What do I mean by that? You cannot convince me that Joseph Smith, or even Brigham Young, had in mind the idea that the Mormon Church should be led by the most doddering, aged, infirm person that you could possibly dig out of the hierarchy of the church in the first place.

But that's what's happened. That's how it works. And it just seems like the Mormon hierarchy is so wedded to its own tradition that nobody has the guts to go, you know what, we need to change this. There needs to be a new way of getting a pope and, Pope.

Getting a prophet, and they both start with P, getting a prophet who isn't 94 years old. How about someone in their 50s? I mean, what could happen if you could actually have an active, healthy, traveling prophet of the Mormon Church?

But at the very same time, I mentioned when we came back, and keep in mind, we are praying toward what would, I consider, I think it would be a historic event this coming April in Utah. We are seeking to have a dialogue at Brigham Young University on campus with a leading New Testament scholar, Mormon New Testament scholar, on the subject of how we view the New Testament and its textual critical history.

This is obviously extremely and vitally important, especially because of the interface that the Book of Mormon has with the text of the Old and New Testaments, and this was not an area of study of Mormonism until the past 30 years or so.

You know, Talmadge and some of those people had some knowledge of these things, but not in the sense of sending people out from Utah to get their PhDs someplace else and then come back. So, also in April is the non -200th anniversary of the First Vision.

Now, let me explain what I mean by that. According to LDS Scripture today, in the spring of 1820, hence the spring of 2020, it'll be 200 years, spring of 1820, Joseph Smith went out into the Sacred Grove.

It wasn't called the Sacred Grove back then, obviously, it's just woods behind the house, and had what's called the First Vision, where he sees God the Father and Jesus Christ as separate, distinct individuals with physical bodies, and he's told he's not to join any of the churches, they're all corrupt, they're creeds are an abomination, professors are corrupt.

And as we have said for a long, long time, that could not have happened in 1820. The Smiths didn't live there in 1820. The revivals to which the references were made, even including names of the Methodist minister, Reverend Lane, that did not take place until 1824.

There was no joining of churches, the churches lost members in the area in 1820, but there was a huge increase in 1824. The revival took place in 1824. And so I say it's the non -200th anniversary, because the only time frame that any of this could have happened will not be until 2024.

So maybe we should plan on having the First Vision really did not happen 200 years ago now, signs, in 2024. It was actually 200 years ago from now that it didn't happen. Yeah, we'll have to think on that.

It'd be sort of hard to come up with a proper sign to make that work. Anyway, so this next conference is going to be a big conference, because they're going to be talking about the First Vision and all that stuff.

And of course, we're planning on being there and going to get that First Vision tract ready to go. Definitely have to have the First Vision tract for that one. I mean, for the 200th anniversary of the non-First Vision.

So there are, you know, they're going to be talking about the First Vision and stuff like that, but I just think back to 1984, I think. I think it was 1984. Somewhere around in there, I might have the date down there.

I'm not going to worry about it. Went up to Salt Lake City. I think this was the trip in the 64 Dodge Dart. I'm not sure. But it was just Michael Beliveau and I. And that's when I went into church. Back then, I'm not sure if I sent you the picture of the new library where they've taken the stuff out of the church office building and now it's in this really catty corner to the big, no, straight across the street from the meeting hall.

They put this big library up. But back then it was in the church office building. We went into the archives. And I'm thinking that we got the call slip from the Tanners. I've got it in there. I still have the call slip in there.

But I'm thinking, how do we know what that number was? I think we got it from Sandra, if I recall correctly. How else would we have known? But anyways, the point is, we went trembling in here to get this photocopy of this page from Joseph Smith's diary from 1834, as I recall.

One of the earliest handwritten accounts of the first vision where there are not two divine beings. And this is 14 years after it allegedly happened. Joseph Smith had not developed his concept of the plurality of gods yet.

That was a couple of years in the future. And I carried that thing around. We used that photocopy for a long, long time. And we had to show that to Mormons because other than, quote unquote, anti-Mormon literature, that's the only place you could find it.

We could tell people, here, you can go look for yourself. Now you can walk into the Deseret Book across the street from the temple. And about the only theology books, the, do you remember how big that store was?

You could walk up and down the aisles. You would simply be stunned if you went in there now. Do you remember, I think it was the first time I went with you, and that we went downstairs and they had the used book section.

Do you remember how massive the used book section was when we started kind of taking into account how many different works and comments and words there were just in explaining and categorizing Mormonism?

It was just a massive amount of words of all this stuff for Mormons to digest. But even the new stuff, I mean, you could just walk up and down shelves, up and down shelves, up and down shelves, all the writings that, you know, and Broussard-McConkie had his own huge section.

You would just be stunned if you walked into Deseret Book today. It looks like your local Christian bookstore, trinkets, plaques, the whole temple section is wide open, which is unusual. The scripture section is fairly small with all the triples and quads and stuff like that.

But the theology section is almost non-existent. And like I said, Broussard-McConkie, a grand total of five books. And that's not five different books. I think it was three books, two copies, two copies, one copy.

It's almost like it never even existed. Well, here again, we have this circumstance. We predict we were talking about this in the 90s nationally. We were seeing it happen in our own circles, the dumbing down of America, the American church as a whole, the entire society, the entire world.

And that's the result of it. Why would we study these things? Why would they look at their own history? Why would they look at any of it? Well, yes and no. I mean, you look at Jehovah's Witnesses, they're facing the same society.

They're facing the same challenges, much lower baptisms, because they don't handle post-modernism very well either. But they never had the subject, the centrality of a subjective testimony problem that Mormonism has.

There's also the, they're a little bit more reclusive, aren't they? The shunning, the... More controlling, yeah. But they're going door-to-door, so they're pretty exposed when they do something like that, even though they're taught not to get in debates and stuff like that, so they try to keep them from being exposed to a lot of stuff.

The internet's made a huge difference there too. Internet, cable television, they can't control their people anymore. But there's something, and this is my argument with Alma, there's something in Mormonism that is inherently making the encounter with the modern world much more difficult for them.

And you just see it. It's fracturing. It's fracturing it, and it's... I never, ever, ever, ever expected to see the Mormon leadership caving on issues of sexual morality, or especially homosexuality or transgenderism.

Their God is gendered. I mean, you want patriarchy? Mormonism's the very definition of patriarchy. I mean, oh my goodness. I, I, you know, yeah, you're just left going, what is going on? It is truly amazing, and there is a crisis of leadership in the LDS Church, and there's many Mormons who admit it.

They're just not put under nearly the same microscope as the Vatican is. But there's a lot of parallels between what's going on between the two of them, to be perfectly honest with you. It's, it's fascinating.

It really is. Could not have predicted that one. Could not have seen that one coming in any way, shape, or form. All right. Okay, let's get to one other thing on the program today. I should have actually gotten to this quicker.

I'm gonna, remember for a little while we were doing story time with, with Uncle Jimmy? Could, it could be Grandpa Jimmy, because I'm, I'm gonna see the kids here. Not too long, you're gonna get to wrestle around with Cadence and Waylon and Clementine in January.

I don't know if you saw the video of Janie waking up up on, they had driven up to the mountain outside of Las Vegas. Chesterton? Is that what it is? Huh? Something like that. I've ridden up it so many times, and it's, there's snow up there.

It's, it's way up there, and she wakes up, and they're in a, they're, there's snow everywhere. And so it's just such a sweet video of her throwing snowballs, and, and of course she, she picks up the snow and says, are you ready?

And then, then chucks it. It's not, that's, not, she'll learn someday. First time she gets nailed, hey, hey, you didn't, you snuck up on me. That's the whole idea. It was so cute. Anyway, so we're gonna, we're gonna get to see the, see the little ones.

James Cone and Black Liberation Theology

Storytime with Uncle Jimmy. I don't like having to read this, but we have to be aware. I first introduced this audience to the writings of James Cone in 2008, over a decade ago, and I just get the feeling that a lot of people, well, first of all, not everyone's heard any of this.

I just get the feeling that those who have sort of think that he was just an eccentric out there guy, but one thing has been proven very clearly over the past couple of years. James Cone has a lot of followers.

He died last year. He has a lot of followers, and those followers are infiltrating churches that we never, ever, ever thought would be subject to this kind of belief. And I mentioned last week his grace, the right Reverend Bishop Talbert Wesley Swan II, and read some of his statements, and he was the guy that said, if heaven's gonna be filled with white evangelicals, I'll take my chances on hell.

His tweet feed is filled with Black racism, which he says does not exist. I have a tweet up, this is from just recently, 22 hours ago, speaking to me. Also, there's no such thing as Black racism, and this is what critical theory says.

Critical theory says that only those with power can be racist, and that therefore only whites can be racist, and so when you have an entire group being told regularly, you cannot commit this sin, that's the best way in the world to make sure that people will commit that sin.

And Talbert Swan is one of the best examples. My understanding is he's a graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Here's one of the greatest examples of the damage that has been done by Black liberation theology in James Cone.

And hence, when we hear professors in Reformed seminaries, Southern Baptist seminaries, saying, oh, James Cone learned a lot from him. He really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. This is a major problem.

Talbert Swan is the result of James Cone. And so when you, for most of us, even though whenever he says anything, he has a choir behind him, not literally, though I'm sure at times he does, but he could say anything, no matter how completely indefensible, completely untrue, completely slanderous it is, and he will have a chorus of mainly women singing his phrases immediately.

You are so smart. It's just amazing. If you don't believe me, go to his Twitter feed. He was banned permanently last year for calling Candace Owen a coon. He doesn't mind doing things like that. But that permanent ban lasted two weeks.

That's how that works when you're on the left. So the point is, what explains someone like this? The hatred, the racism, the bigotry, the bias, the just, and of course, he just throws those things out all the time.

Anybody who disagrees with him as a white supremacist, he doesn't have to offer any examples. He doesn't have to reason. A critical theory does not require the oppressed to reason, but neither does James Cone, and that's the point.

James Cone's writings need to be identified as the utter heresy that they are. You don't need to have Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary posting podcasts honoring James Cone when he dies. There's a problem here.

So we need to read a little James Cone to understand Talbert Swan and understand how he can say there is no such thing as black racism. As I said last time, if racism is a sin, then anyone can commit it.

If racism is not something that certain people can commit, then it's not a sin. It's a political tool, and that's exactly how the term is being used by Talbert Swan and by others. It's a political label only.

It has no moral component to it, but what they do is they barter on the idea that you still have the moral aspect in the back of your mind, even though they're only using it in a political sense, and that's how they're effective in influencing people's thinking.

So in a couple of Cone's books, in Black Theology and Black Power and in God of the Oppressed, he addresses the issue of reconciliation, and when he does so, I want you to hear. Now, I'm not reading. We've spent a lot of time in the past reading James Cone.

We've talked about he talks about the black Jesus, and God is black, and when you read it, there is a clear, animus, prejudice, and bigotry on Cone's part toward whites in general. It's just all through it.

It's very difficult to read. It's very rambling. He was obviously a brilliant guy, but not a clear thinker. Not an ordered thinker, anyways. But this is from Black Theology and Black Power under the subtitle Reconciliation.

When Black Theology emphasizes the necessity of a theology of revolution based on the unity of black people committed to the task of destroying white racism, it is to be expected that many white religious people will ask, what about the biblical message of reconciliation?

Whites who ask the question of blacks should not be surprised if some blacks reply, yeah, man, what about it? The question, while it may be legitimate, bears a close resemblance to the old or new questions about integration and love.

White people creating the barriers of separation now want to know whether black people are willing to let bygones be bygones. That is why Stokely Carmichael said, as for separatism, what are they talking about?

We have no choice. They separated us a long time ago, and they sure intend to keep it that way. White people have short memories. Otherwise, how are black people to interpret questions about reconciliation, love, and other white values?

Is it human to expect black people to pretend that their parents were not chattels in society? Let me stop for just a moment. Did you catch that? Reconciliation, love, and other white values. Okay. Is it human to expect black people to pretend their parents were not chattels in society?

There are a lot of black people today that that wouldn't be true, and it wouldn't be true of the next generation even farther back. But anyway. Oh, by the way, everything that I'm reading is fully American.

What I mean by that is Cone's theology is American theology. It makes no sense anywhere else in the world. It makes no sense in Canada. It makes no sense in Mexico. It makes no sense anywhere, but we are still exporting it to the great destruction of the places where it's being exported to.

But it's very American and not overly fair that either. Do they really expect black people to believe that their status today is unrelated to the slavery of the past? Do they expect black people to believe that this society is not basically racist from top to bottom?

And now white religious people want to know what can be done about the wall of hostility between blacks and whites? Some critics of black theology are certainly going to suggest my approach to theology will do more towards the separation of black and white Americans than toward reconciliation.

And yet there is an appropriate concluding word to be spoken about reconciliation. First, let me say reconciliation on white racist terms is impossible since it would crush the dignity of black people.

Under these conditions, blacks must treasure their hostility. Yeah, that's what I said. Blacks must treasure their hostility, bring it fully into consciousness as an irreducible quality of their identity.

If white people insist on laying the ground rules for reconciliation, which can only mean black people denying the beauty of their blackness, then black people must do everything within their power to destroy the white thing.

Black people can only speak of reconciliation when the black community is permitted to do its thing. The black community has experienced the crushing white thing too long. Therefore, black theology believes that in order for reconciliation to be meaningful and productive, black people must have room to do their thing.

The black community itself must lay down the rules of the game. White oppressors are incompetent to dictate the terms of reconciliation because they are enslaved by their own racism and will inevitably seek to base the terms on their right to play God in human relationships.

The history of slavery and Jim Crow and integration efforts renders white people virtually incapable of knowing even how to talk to black people as persons. It is this fact that nullifies the good intentions of concerned white religious people who insist that they are prepared to relate to black people as human beings.

They simply do not know how. Since racism is inseparable from the history of America, and since practically all white people in this country are taught from birth to treat blacks as things, black theology must counsel black people to be suspicious of all whites who want to be friends of black people.

Remember, this is a man that people call a Christian theologian. Therefore, the real question is not whether black theology sees reconciliation as an end, but rather on whose terms we are to be reconciled.

The problem of reconciliation is the oppressor's problem. Being accustomed to defining human relationships between themselves and the slaves on I-it terms, they naturally think that they have a monopoly on truth and right behavior.

But when the slaves begin to say no to the God behavior of the masters, the masters are surprised. They are surprised because they thought the slaves were happy. They cannot believe that the hostilities of the slaves stem from anything that the masters themselves have done.

But neither can they believe that the unrest in the slave camps is motivated from within the slave community. Remember, these books are still in print, and they were written back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe into the 90s.

Slave camps, slave communities, 130 years down the road. Therefore, in an attempt to explain the phenomenon of slave hostility, the masters devised tests which will show that most, if not all, people in the society are happy, and the disorders are created by outside agitators who can easily be lumped into one category, communists.

All unhappiness is a lie created and perpetuated by the ungodly communists who want to destroy the free American society. There are usually enough slaves around who have been so crushed by the forces of evil that they do in fact respond according to the intentions of the masters.

These slaves become the actual evidence that the slaves as a whole are satisfied with their condition. With this kind of assurance, the masters can begin to stamp out offenders against law and order, killing or all who refuse to cooperate with the laws against humanity.

Please notice, just in passing, the dehumanization of anyone who would disagree with Black theology and Black power, which is exactly what you see Talbert Swan doing. In today's tweets, in the past 24 hours, you have him using language of Christian men, such as Daryl Harrison, in such an incredibly not just disrespectful fashion, but just absolutely sinful.

Just absolutely sinful. Um, there was something even about dancing at one point, as I recall, um, as I'm looking through this. Let me see here. Uh, I know it's in here somewhere. Foot-shuffling, boot-licking white supremacy apologists trying to smear, okay, oh, trying to smear the great theologian Dr. James Cone.

This is about Daryl Harrison. You work for John MacArthur, a racist evangelical who wrote a manifesto declaring social justice antithetical to scripture. You work in the house, not in the field. No white person could ever say that to a Black person without getting kicked off Twitter in a second.

But this man will treat fellow Blacks in this fashion with impunity. And here it is right here. That's what James Cone did. And James Cone was lauded. Lauded. I have, I have Talbert Swan's, um, eulogy for James Cone when he died.