Dr. James Hal Cone & A Black Theology of Liberation
James Hal Cone (August 5, 1938 - ) is an African-American Christian theologian in the Methodist tradition. He is one of America's best known architects of Black theology, a form of Liberation theology. He is currently the Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.
Cone was born and raised in Arkansas and received a B.A. degree from Philander Smith College in Arkansas in 1958, a B.D. degree from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1961, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University in 1963 and 1965, respectively. He taught theology and religion at Philander Smith College, Adrian College in Michigan, and beginning in 1970 at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he was awarded the distinguished Charles A. Briggs Chair in systematic theology in 1977.
James Cone was the first person to create a systematic Black theology. He felt that Black Christians in Northern America should not follow the "white Church", as it had failed to support them in their struggle for equal rights. Though this theme runs throughout Cone's work, his early books (Black Theology and Black Power and A Black Theology of Liberation) draw heavily on mainstream white theologians like Karl Barth (on whom Cone had written his doctoral thesis) and Paul Tillich.
In response to criticism from other black theologians (including his brother, Cecil), Cone began to make greater use of resources native to the African American Christian community for his theological work, including slave spirituals, the blues, and the writings of prominent African American thinkers like David Walker, Henry McNeal Turner, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Critiques by black women also led Cone to make consideration of gender issues more prominent in his later writings, thus paving the way for Womanist theology. His theology has also been heavily influenced by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As the influence of the church on American society has waned, there have been those who have sought to make it more relevant to the real life concerns of individuals. This has been particularly true in the African-American community, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave fresh meaning and relevance to the church during the period 1955-1968. Yet another effort to make the church relevant was that of liberation theology.
Liberation theology arose in the third world--specifically Latin America--where it was recognized that one's view of God and his action in the world can be profoundly altered by one's praxis or experience of life. The God of the wealthy is rather different from the God worshipped in the barrios or slums of the major cities in such countries as Peru or Brazil. This idea that one's view of the gospel is shaped by one's location in life has taken firm root in certain groups in the United States, and specifically among blacks and women.
Black Theology
Liberation theology as it has expressed itself in the African-American community seeks to find a way to make the gospel relevant to black people who must struggle daily under the burden of white oppression. The question that confronts these black theologians is not one that is easily answered. "What if anything does the Christian gospel have to say to powerless black men," to use James Cone's words, whose existence is "threatened on a daily basis by the insidious tentacles of white power?" If the gospel has nothing to say to people as they confront the daily realities of life, it is a lifeless message. If Christianity is not real for blacks, then they will reject it.
There are many reasons why Christianity has not been real for blacks. To begin with, white Christianity emphasizes individualism, and divides the world into separate realms of the sacred and secular, public and private. Such a view of the world is alien to African-American spirituality. The Christianity that was communicated to blacks had as its primary focus life in world to come. This was at odds with traditional African spirituality which was focused on life in the present world. And if that were not enough, Christianity is hopelessly associated with slavery and segregation in the minds of many African-Americans.
More importantly, there are reasons to believe that many African-Americans are beginning to reject Christianity. The growing presence of Islam in the African-American community is nurtured by a variety of forces, but one of its principle sources of strength is the sense within many blacks of a tremendous gap that exists between what takes place in the Church on Sunday, and how church people live the rest of the week. Many of the new converts to Islam were Christian, but they testify to seeing little coherence between the worship of the church, and the rough and tumble world of the streets the rest of the week.
One element of Islam that has attracted many African-Americans is the fact that Muslims have a strong reputation for living what they preach. Whereas church members might spend much of their week hanging out and drinking, Muslims demonstrate discipline, respect, and personal integrity that many in the black community feel is lacking among many members of the church. In a similar fashion, the Muslim claim that Christianity was imposed on blacks by the slaveholders has struck a sensitive nerve in the black community, and has aided them in the effort to win new converts. Growing numbers of blacks have accepted the proposition that Islam was the original faith of African-Americans. As a result, the same forces driving Afro-centrism are also prompting many blacks to explore their roots in Islam.
In the face of all this, the question that confronts the advocates of a black theology of liberation is somewhat intimidating. "Can one still be black, and believe in the biblical tradition as expressed in the Old and New Testaments?" Can the Christian faith be stripped of the interpretations given these sacred texts by whites, and be made real for black men and women?
The Starting Point for a Black Theology of Liberation
To develop a theology that speaks to African-Americans, black liberation theologians such as James Cone begin with the person of Jesus, and specifically the Jesus revealed in the Gospel of Luke. In Luke's gospel, Jesus has a concern for the oppressed that does not always come through in the other gospels. Luke's Jesus begins his ministry with this announcement:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4:18-19)
From this text, Cone draws a fundamental lesson about Jesus: his "work is essentially one of liberation." Jesus inaugurates "an age of liberation in which 'the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them.'" (Luke 7:22) "In Christ," Cone argues, "God enters human affairs and takes sides with the oppressed. Their suffering becomes his; their despair, divine despair."
Cone continues his line of argument with a force that cuts to the marrow of contemporary American Christianity: "Jesus had little toleration for the middle- or upper-class religious snob whose attitude attempted to usurp the sovereignty of God and destroy the dignity of the poor," Cone writes, "The Kingdom is not for the poor and not the rich because the former has nothing to expect from the world while the latter's entire existence is grounded in his commitment to worldly things. The poor man may expect everything from God, while the rich man may expect nothing because he refuses to free himself from his own pride. It is not that poverty is a pre-condition for entrance into the Kingdom. But those who recognize their utter dependence on God, and wait on him despite the miserable absurdity of life are typically the poor, according to Jesus."
When black people hear this message, Cone insists, they discover a message that resonates with their experience of life. Their experience of struggling for liberation is the same as the struggle of Christ himself. And if Jesus was resurrected, and is now alive, then he is now fighting for the very same things, working against the structures of injustice.
The Great Satan
In the New Testament, Jesus comes into the world to destroy the works of Satan. If the preceding identification of the struggle of Jesus and that of African-Americans seeking liberation is true, then there must also be a Satan in the contemporary picture. Black Theology does not get bogged down in quaint personifications of Satan (the current issue of Newsweek has a wonderful article on Satan, by the way), but sees him at work in the powers and principalities of this world that would enslave and demean human beings. And the most demonic of these powers in the black experience is that of racism.
Cone writes: "Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man 'the devil.' The white structure of this American society, personified in every racist, must be at least part of what the New Testament meant by demonic forces...Ironically, the man who enslaves another enslaves himself...To be free to do what I will in relation to another is to be in bondage to the law of least resistance. This is the bondage of racism. Racism is that bondage in which whites are free to beat, rape, or kill blacks. About thirty years ago it was acceptable to lynch a black man by hanging him from a tree; but today whites destroy him by crowding him into a ghetto and letting filth and despair put the final touches on death."
James Cone wrote those words in 1968, and while they are dated, they still convey a powerful truth. What happened to Rodney King at the hands of the Los Angeles police continues to happen to black men with disturbing frequency. The jails and prisons are filling with black men. One third of all black men are now under the jurisdiction of the courts or prison system. And one of the principle reasons are drug laws designed to punish with mandatory prison terms those who use "rock cocaine" (the principle form of cocaine used in the black community because it is relatively inexpensive), while penalties for possession of the powder form (the form used by wealthy whites) are largely financial, and do not require one to serve time. Why would society design a criminal justice system with such disparate impact? Cone and many blacks would lay the blame at the feet of the demonic force of racism.
The Goal of Black Liberation Theology
What is the goal of Black Liberation Theology? Is it a society in which Blacks are given special treatment and rights? No. All Black theologians are asking for is for freedom and justice. No more, and no less. In asking for this, the Black theologians turn to scripture as the sanction for their demand. The Psalmist writes for instance, "If God is going to see righteousness established in the land, he himself must be particularly active as 'the helper of the fatherless' (Psalm 10:14) to 'deliver the needy when he crieth; and the poor that hath no helper' (Psalm 72:12).
Black liberation theologians do not intend to allow the church--whether it be white or black--to evade this responsibility. It "cannot say that the poor are in poverty because they will not work, or that they suffer because they are lazy. Having come before God as nothing and being received by him into his Kingdom through grace, the Christian should know that he has been made righteous (justified) so that he (or she) can join God in the fight for justice. Therefore, whoever fights for the poor, fights for God; whoever risks his life for the helpless and unwanted, risks his life for God."
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