This is a book review I wrote on James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation for a class on modern theology. I’m primarily posting it here because I need to reference my thoughts in another paper, but I hope readers might appreciate the review.
James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation was first written, as Cone notes in the Postscript to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition, at the height of the civil rights and black power movements in 1969.[1] Cone says that “[n]o one can understand this book apart from the social and political context in which it was written.”[2] In particular, at the time he wrote this book, Cone had become frustrated with theology written by “white privileged intellectuals.”[3] He wanted to write a specifically black theology within, to, and for the black experience.
The book begins with a description of Cone’s theological method. For Cone, “Christian theology is a theology of liberation.”[4] In particular, Christian theology “is a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ.”[5] This definition of theology seems consistent with other kinds of liberation theologies, and indeed seems somewhat conventional. Cone draws his existentialist approach from noted white theologians such as Barth and Tillich. However, Cone not only argues for “liberation” as a central motif in an existentialist theology, but further states that “black theology affirms the black condition as the primary datum of reality . . . .”[6]
The centrality of blackness to existential reality and therefore to theology, for Cone, means that “whites are in no position whatever to question the legitimacy of black theology.”[7] White theology, Cone argues throughout the book, is a theology of oppression, beginning with the extermination of Amerindians and running through the enslavement of blacks. Indeed, for Cone, “whites have only one purpose: the destruction of everything which is not white.”[8] The rationality of black theology therefore need not, and should not, remain subject to the criterion for legitimacy drawn from white theology.
Notwithstanding this strong affirmation of the independence of Black theology, Cone proceeds to describe the sources and methods of Black theology in apparently conventional terms: they include scripture, experience, and above all Jesus Christ.[9] The “experience” Cone thinks is relevant, however, is the black experience of oppression. The black experience is in fact the lens Cone uses to interpret scripture and Christ: “[t]he meaning of scripture is not found in the words of scripture as such but only in its power to point beyond itself to the reality of God’s revelation – and in America, that means black liberation.”[10] The meaning of “black liberation” is crucial to Cone’s theology in this book. As noted above, Cone wrote the book in the midst of the black power movement. Cone’s view of “black liberation,” therefore, included potentially violent resistance to white America. For Cone, “[t]he black experience is the feeling one has when attacking the enemy of black humanity by throwing a Molotov cocktail into a white-owned building and watching it go up in flames.”[11]
Cone then proceeds to a discussion of what “God” means in black theology. Consistent with his existentialist bent, he understands the term “God” to point to a transcendental reality that interprets history. For Cone, this means in particular the history of God’s liberation of Israel as narrated in scripture and the history of God’s liberation of black people.[12] At this point in the text, an apparent contradiction arises in Cone’s argument. While “[t]he black theology view of God must be sharply distinguished from white distortions,” Cone suggests that “[t]his does not mean that black theology rejects white theology entirely.”[13] Nevertheless, on the very next page after this statement, Cone says “[t]he goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods.”[14]
This contrast should be read as intentionally dialectical, as begins to become clearer in the next two chapters on theological anthropology and Jesus Christ.[15] While Cone does identify blackness with black bodies, he also notes that “[i]n the literal sense a black person is anyone who has ‘even one drop of black blood in his or her veins.’”[16] In Cone’s chapters on anthropology and Christology, blackness begins to seem more like an existential condition summed up in the black American experience rather than merely a skin color.
The final chapter discusses ecclesiology, culture, and eschatology. Cone’s eschatology is strongly immanent. He criticizes futurist eschatologies as means by which whites have encouraged blacks to remain docile in their servitude in hope of a future reward.[17] His view of culture is similarly immediate to the lived experience of oppressed black people: “[t]he world is not a metaphysical entity or an ontological problem. . . . It is very concrete. It is punching clocks, taking orders, fighting rats, and being kicked around by police officers.”[18] Similarly, eschatology, for Cone, must be realized in the present struggle for black liberation. Nevertheless, he also recognizes the importance of “the future reality of life after death” as “grounded in Christ’s resurrection” because this hope supplies the courage to face death in the struggle for liberation.[19]
It is somewhat jarring for me – a white middle-aged lawyer, studying theology in a historically mostly white evangelical context – to read this text. Cone’s frequent use of terms like “whitey,” his apparent calls to violence by blacks against whites, and his insistence that whites cannot critique black theology, initially seem to suggest that this text bears little value for a broader theological conversation, if it is not in fact completely unhinged. But a more careful reading of the text within its own historical context argues for a subtler interpretation. Cone brilliantly deploys modern white existentialist theology to challenge the very notion of “whiteness.” He shows that what American culture has assumed as “normal” – the white middle class – is in fact not consistent with the fundamental norms of scripture and Jesus Christ. Cone challenges us to see that what white American culture has despised – blackness – is, in fact, the true Christian norm precisely because it has been despised.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to know how to interpret some of the passages in this text that seem to call for black violence against whites. At times Cone seems seriously to endorse immediate violence, and at other time he seems to suggest that violence is more of a possibility than a necessity. In his chapter on eschatology, for example, Cone concludes that “[l]ooting, burning, or the destruction of white property are not primary concerns. Such matters can only be decided by the oppressed themselves who are seeking to develop their images of the black Christ.”[20] Although even the suggestion that violence might be appropriate seems shocking, Cone repeatedly invokes Nat Turner, the heroic leader of a slave rebellion prior to the Civil War, in a way that brilliantly disarms modern white liberals who eschew violence.[21]
Ultimately, I suppose I must accept Cone’s judgment that, as a white man, I cannot judge black theology. As a white man, I learn from Cone what the experience of “blackness” in America can mean in relation to the existential core of the Gospel. I cannot endorse the calls to violence in this text, but I can at least recognize how my requirement of nonviolent social change implicates a long history of racism that is anything but peaceful.
[1] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 40th Anniv. Ed. 2010), 152.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., Preface to the 1986 Edition.
[4] Ibid., 1.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 5.
[7] Ibid., 8.
[8] Ibid., 12.
[9] Ibid., Ch. 2.
[10] Ibid., 34.
[11] Ibid., 25.
[12] Ibid., Chapter 4.
[13] Ibid., 64.
[14] Ibid., 65.
[15] Ibid., Chapters 5 and 6.
[16] Ibid., 69.
[17] Ibid., 145.
[18] Ibid., 140.
[19] Ibid., 150.
[20] Ibid., 130.
[21] See, e.g., ibid.