Since starting postulancy and seminary work, I've gone mostly silent here but for the occasional sermon. I am embarking upon a haphazard plan to go back through some of the shorter and more interesting (I say) 'reading response'-type assignments and post them here. This post is the third of a three-part series from a course I took at UVa this summer on The Black Church and American Culture. In it I am responding to a few essays/chapters assigned by the founder of black liberation theology, James Cone.
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Although my reaction to James Cone's provocative and stimulating theological work was far from uniformly negative, I do want to use this as an opportunity to work through two particular difficulties that present themselves immediately after reading.
Cone asserts that the person of Jesus Christ and the experience of black Americans must be held in constant dialectical tension with one another, but it is quite clear which holds ultimate and absolute primacy throughout. The experience of black Americans serves as the governing principle for interpreting, for filtering, Cone's reading of Jesus. (This is abundantly clear in the two chapters from A Black Theology of Liberation, somewhat less clear in “Who Is Jesus Christ for us Today?” from God of the Oppressed.) Cone claims that Jesus’ historical and biblical Jewishness fundamentally means that he identifies with the oppressed. That in turn requires, in contemporary context, that Jesus be identified as black. Of course, Jesus does indeed identify with the oppressed, and he must be identified with, for, and to black Americans. But should he be identified as black? Cone is right that the white European Jesus has no more historical and perhaps less theological basis. But this is ultimately so because the Second Person of the Trinity did not cease to be incarnate at the resurrection or ascension. He remains Jesus. He remains Jewish. Cone has determined, however, that the sole relevant factor in Jesus’ Jewish particularity is the oppression Jews experienced. Yet the Jews of the Bible were not only oppressed; they were often oppressors. Cone would perhaps say that this element is irrelevant to the narrative God was weaving in his interaction with the Jewish people—but then that’s precisely the problem. Cone has decided in advance what about Jesus counts and what doesn’t, which means that the Jesus of whom he speaks is inevitably his creation, subject to his whims and inclinations and manipulations. Cone’s Jesus is powerful and provocative—but cannot be authoritative.
Of course, Cone has already anticipated and dismissed my objections as those of a white man with a vested interest in maintaining the oppressive status quo. There’s no question that I will never fully understand the experience of black Americans. As much reading and thinking and listening as I might do, I will always be essentially an outsider speaking from a position of fundamental and insurmountable ignorance. Thus I have nothing to say that is worth Cone’s hearing. That’s fine so far as it goes—he really and truly has absolutely no reason to listen to my voice, even if it could be divorced from my whiteness. But the principle also creates an echo chamber for Cone. Cone’s dismissal insulates his position, at least in theory, from any serious engagement with critical positions. Critiques by whites are meaningless, of course, but Cone has also defined being black as agreeing with his position: “Black thinkers… cannot be black and identified with the powers that be. To be black is to be committed to destroying everything this country loves and adores” (21). Implicitly, then, blacks who would disagree are in fact not black but white. Regardless of the merits of that argument, the most troubling element is that Cone has managed to create a situation in which he need not listen to any dissenting voices, in which the only voice that counts happens to be his.
