My relationship to James Cone's theology

A friend recently asked me what I think of James Cone these days, and I realized that I haven’t written about race and racism in a long time. And never having written about it here, it occurs to me that some of you might not know that I have brown skin. And more than that: I spent half of my doctoral dissertation on the theology of James Cone, who was the most significant figure of black liberation theology until his death in 2018.

I started reading Cone seriously and with the aim of writing about him academically in 2012. (On the American racial timeline: a few months after Trayvon Martin was killed and two years before Michael Brown was killed—before the birth of Black Lives Matter, but still in keeping with the spirit of the age.) Unlike what happened with Robert Jenson, Cone never welcomed me as a student or friend, and the one time he invited me to his home—after I sent him a draft dissertation chapter—he spent an hour yelling at me in an attempt to get me not to write a dissertation about him and Jenson. When I finally got a word in, I made it clear that I wasn’t going to be browbeaten into abandoning my work. (He was stunned and said, “You’re more interesting than I thought you would be.”) It was a jarring, hurtful experience, but Cone’s work had an enormous influence on my thinking, and in that meeting he revealed something about his theology that I might not have seen in his books. So while I have no personal fondness for him, I did come to pity him that day.

I learned that Cone’s desire to speak freely was frustrated by what he was expected to say and expected not to say. He spoke about this experience plainly, if also inadvertently. And is there anything more depressing than a liberationist who can’t speak freely? I think that Cone was committed to a deeply stifling sub-community of the theological academy and that as a result he stopped writing theologically, by which I mean that he stopped writing about God.

By the late 1980s, all of Cone’s published work was either about history or the moral failure of professional theologians because of their widespread indifference to white supremacy. Theology is sometimes called “second-order discourse,” that is, interpretive writing that exists only in relation to the primary discourse of Christian faith: Scripture, creeds, prayer, liturgy, preaching, hymnody, and so on. Well, Cone’s work after the eighties isn’t even secondary discourse. Such a focus on history or the problems academic theology is more accurately described as tertiary or even quaternary discourse.

Nothing is wrong with critiquing academic theology. I am doing it right now. And my point isn’t that the work Cone published after 1986 is wrong or bad. (In fact, I think Martin and Malcolm and America, which Cone published in 1991, is one of his best and most important books.) Rather, I am saying that Cone found himself unable to speak about God, that speaking well and rightly of God is actually the entire point of black theology, and that Cone knew it.

Some people would argue: “No, black liberation theology is about liberating black people!”

That is a stupid objection. Why would theology, of all things, be an instrument for liberation? Was Marxist class analysis an insufficient tool? Or the Declaration of Independence? Or how about direct action? Or was it that the desire to have the white boot removed from the black neck was an insufficient motivation? Multiple riots and protests were not enough evidence that black people had the will to be free?

What Cone understood, but which too few left-leaning theological types seem to get, is that theology is required for liberation because freedom is possible only if freedom is true. And freedom is true only if God is its agent and guarantor. Cone understood that if there is no God, or if God is not the one who makes and keeps us free, our quest for freedom is a power struggle that has no more inherent legitimacy than the forces of oppression.

In other words, Cone once did what John Webster would call “theological theology”—theology done as though God actually exists and matters and is the subject of a verb. (Some other people would argue that Cone’s theology never was really theological. But again, some people are wrong.) When Cone began talking about black theology, he wasn’t talking first of all about theology done by black theologians, but was rather saying something about God. Theology should be “black” because its true object, God, had revealed himself as “black”: by electing in the Incarnation to be a Jew, and so making himself a recipient of the scorn, repulsion, fear, and derision of the powerful, God revealed his character, his nature, and what he intended for the human creatures whom he made and came to save. Black theology stated that “God is black,” and any theologian of any skin color could therefore do black theology by converting to “blackness”—by unreserved identification with Jesus and the “least of these” his brethren. To deny the blackness of God, insisting instead that God is colorless or white (which are finally the same thing), is therefore to deny the Incarnation and to fall into some heresy: Arianism, Docetism, Marcionism, etc. Racism isn’t a sin, but a heresy.

Of course, one may disagree with Cone’s theology, but theology it is.

This fact is no surprise. Cone was a student of Karl Barth’s theology. And whether you like or dislike Barth, one thing you can’t deny is that his break with liberal Protestant theology consisted simply of the idea that theology was about God and not about human experience, human values, human longings, human spirituality, or any of the other idolatries that Barth damned with the label “religion.” Even when Cone began to make use of Paul Tillich’s ideas, the object of his theology remained God.

But what Cone once argued as a conclusion quickly became an unquestionable premise. If he once argued that the exodus and the Incarnation revealed that the church’s Lord won human freedom, he was soon evaluating doctrinal claims by their conformity to liberation struggles. God was no longer an end, and now God-talk was a means. Likewise, freedom was no longer the promise of salvation, but a right to work for as we determine our own future, and religion was one of the tools in that work:

…if religion generally and the Christian faith in particular is an imaginative and apocalyptic vision about the creation of a new humanity that is derived from the historical and political struggles of oppressed peoples, then to describe it as a sedative is to misunderstand religion’s essential nature and its latent revolutionary and humanizing thrust in society. (emphasis mine)

Cone wrote that in 1982.

The consequence might have been predictable: Cone stopped writing about God around 1986. Right after claiming that theology has revolutionary potential as a tool for liberation, he stopped doing theology. And what would have been a call to Christians to be more radically faithful to Christianity became a boring, repetitive moralism wielded only to criticize people, but powerless to free them.

My hunch is that the change in Cone’s theology had to do with the elite position he held at Union Theological Seminary and the expectations of elite academic theology. Going around saying that Jesus is the one true revelation of God, and that that’s the basis for our hope as humans doesn’t get you invited to the exclusive wine receptions at the American Academy of Religion. I think Cone became important, and that he came to think of his beliefs as a threat to that importance. Cone was also humble enough to listen carefully to his critics, and I think he listened to the wrong ones.

Whatever the reasons, Cone’s work shifted into moralism.

Churches have mostly gone the way that Cone went, acting as though we are dealing with a self-evident ethical matter that people are failing to take seriously enough because they are bad or lazy or scared or greedy or ignorant. And I have spent the last several years objecting to this moralism, and attempting but generally failing to convince people that churchly efforts to address racism must be theological.

On intellectual grounds, I reject the self-evidence of moral claims against racism, and I think it’s the job of Christian theologians to give people the gift of a Christian anthropology, a Christian doctrine of God, and a robustly Christian account of salvation and hope. But the matter is not simply about intellectual integrity or rigorous theology. When black liberation theology fails to be “theological theology,” it also fails to be liberating theology.

I am not speaking theoretically. The lived reality of this moralistic theology is not freedom. Both black theology and secular antiracism, which are basically impossible to distinguish from one another, have variously made people miserable, alienated, uncertain of themselves and their relationships, fearful, proud, petty, exacting, and merciless. What was meant to bring freedom and community has been burdensome and antisocial.

The real tragedy, of course, is that white supremacy is a reality, and the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow have not been dealt with fully. So it’s not just that moralistic black theology has failed, but that it is itself a major impediment to achieving those things that are its alleged goals. The same can be said for contemporary antiracism.

And if I were to suggest a corrective, the first place I’d look would be Cone’s work—especially from his early years.