Abstract
Many consider James Cone to be the father of academic Black theology, and as such he is a substantial figure in any discussion of race, theology, and racism in the United States. His work is undergoing a reassessment in light of his recent passing and the posthumous publication of his autobiography, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, Black Theology and Black Power. Though reassessment is always a part of the ongoing work of theology, the danger remains that work on Cone might not move beyond discussions of his place in the pantheon of contemporary theologians. This special issue represents an attempt to do more than assess what Cone’s place should be in the life of the academy and the Church. It asks the question, what would engaging Cone’s work constructively look like, attempting to move Cone’s work beyond Cone for the sake of the next fifty years of theological discussions on race, theology, racism, White supremacy, globalization, and a host of other issues central to our contemporary contexts.
This issue recognizes, along with Cone, that our particular locations bring various biases, as well as opportunities, to our work. It insists that gender, race, global location, class, and discipline are lenses through which we view and talk about God. For this reason, the authors selected for this issue represent a diversity of perspectives from which to engage and expand Cone’s theological agenda. They include theologians, biblical scholars, ministers, activists, and artists. Both male and female voices are in the mix. They are racially diverse and represent various global perspectives including the United States, Canada, and South Africa. They are theologically diverse and include post-modernists, conservative evangelicals, and Baptists from across the theological spectrum. The hope is that this diversity will bring both energy to and renewed interest in Cone’s important critique of racism, expanding it for a new generation of theologians, pastors, ministers, and congregants. More importantly, the hope is that this project, viewed as a whole, will offer something beyond its individual parts, that the unity of work here might serve to suggest that intersectional work is possible, and perhaps necessary, from any gendered, racial, political, or theological location in which we find ourselves, that both progressive Christians and fundamentalists, Blacks and Whites, and those who reside in the global north and those who reside in the global south have something to contribute to our contemporary understanding of God in an often confused and confusing world.
We desire that you, our reader, will be open to reading, with a keen eye, your own location in the world, that you would be willing to ask, along with us, where you are situated in the midst of often divisive questions and how that affects your perspective. Far from suggesting that you simply accept who you are, we are also asking you to ask who you might be as you encounter voices that are not your own and allow yourself to be questioned by them. In effect, we are asking that you not only learn through this work to read Cone but that you also allow Cone, and the authors of this issue, to read you. Ultimately, we are asking that you join the dialogue with “eyes wide open.”
As is Review & Expositor’s practice, the issue begins with a contribution from a member of the journal’s supporting consortium. In “A word about . . . Construction of racism: The challenges and opportunities for promoting justice and modeling race-transcending societies,” Caleb O. Oladipo, who holds the Snellings Chair of Christian Evangelism and Missions at Campbell University Divinity School, discusses racism via the identification of four “pillars” that have sustained racism worldwide. Oladipo explores aspects of race typology, including conceptualizations of “Black” and “White.” He asserts that hope for a “defective society” is in the eradication of racism, which should be a central mission of the Church.
The issue’s thematic articles begin with an article entitled, “The view from the street,” by activist and professor Vahisha Hasan. Her article takes up Cone’s suggestion that orthodoxy must lead to orthopraxy. Hasan unpacks the ways that Black liberation theology is mirrored in the lives of persons who engage both their faith and their bodies in active service to others who are oppressed and marginalized. She also defines being on the “front line” of faith-based social action as placing our bodies in danger for the good of the other. Her article is not far from Cone when it encourages us to see all areas of our lives as potentially the “front line” of the fight against White supremacy and for the liberation of the oppressed.
My article, “A starting point for understanding James Cone: A primer for White readers,” attempts to place Cone in historical perspective while also suggesting ways that properly reading him, or more precisely not misreading him, presents opportunities for deeper engagement by Baptist theologians, ministers, and congregants. I attempt to make clear Cone’s primary scholarly agenda and his intentional revolutionary persona. To place Cone in relation to the cultural revolutionary arm of the Black Power Movement and particularly in relation to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s is critical to how we read and apply Cone’s work. I see Cone’s Black/White dualism as not only present in but also central to appropriation in the context of contemporary North American society. Evident in a later article, Professor Van Huffel, situated in South Africa and a proponent of poststructuralist reading, opposes the reading of Cone vis-à-vis Cone’s preference that the reader read beyond Cone to broader understandings. The two articles taken together suggest that context matters when engaging Cone constructively.
Baptist historian and theologian William Brackney engages Cone’s assumption that White Supremacy is historically embedded in White theology in the article, “James Cone, White supremacy, and the Baptist narrative.” Though one might expect Brackney merely to provide a survey of racist incidents in Baptist life and theology, he takes an altogether different approach, preferring instead to “turn the spotlight” on Baptist historians themselves, assessing how Black Baptists have or have not been included in Baptist historiography. He identifies ways Baptist historians have shaped the narrative of Baptist history that often minimize and decentralize the life of the Black Baptist church. He is ultimately asking how Baptist historiography has advanced White supremacy in determining whose narratives matter most.
If Brackney’s article reminds us that history is shaped by those who write it, Ron Potter’s republished article serves to demonstrate how easy it is to forget history. “The new Black evangelical” was originally published in Cone and Wilmore’s Black Theology: A Documentary History. The article appeared in the original one-volume edition but did not appear when the work was issued in two volumes. Recent scholarship is suggesting that a Black social gospel movement existed in the United States separate from the well-known White social gospel movement. Potter, however, was suggesting the emergence of a radical Black evangelical movement distinct from radical White evangelicalism as early as 1979. The article indicates both a diversity of perspectives within Black church life, which tends to get amalgamated in Cone’s version of Black theology, and an underreported role for the Black church in the evangelical movement itself. Potter’s article represents both a cautionary tale as regards historical stereotyping and an opportunity to advance a more diverse picture of Black social action and liberation.
Placing James Cone in conversation with Fredrick Herzog, Joerg Rieger advocates, in “Engaging whiteness (more) constructively: Conversations with James Cone and Fredrick Herzog on the future of race and class in theology,” that Cone’s Black theology would speak best to White Christians if it included an analysis of both race and class. Cone viewed Herzog as one of the few White theologians who truly understood Black theology, and he also recognized in his own work a deficiency in his neglect of class as a category of oppression. Rieger suggests that the time has come to think more clearly about the intersections of class and race toward a theology that will have significance in both Black and White communities. This intersectionality opens up the dialogue rather than shuts it down and calls White theologians in particular to ask how they could benefit further from consideration of both race and class in their theological work.
Mark Catlin approaches his work on Cone from the perspective of Cone’s biblical theology in his article, “God opposes the proud: James Cone, White theologians and Proverbs 3:34.” Catlin asserts that Cone was not incorrect in recognizing that liberation is a stream in the biblical narrative and that perhaps Cone’s biblical sketch might be expanded. Using an inter-biblical approach to Prov 3:34, Catlin demonstrates a stream within the biblical narrative that not only shows God’s liberation of the poor, but also God’s chastisement of the oppressor. Whereas Cone focuses primarily on those texts that show the liberation of the oppressed, Catlin wonders if it might also be useful to show how the biblical text points to the oppressor and displays both God’s preference for the poor and God’s requirement for change in the life of the oppressor.
Frank Anderson, writing from his position as the Director of Union University’s Center for Racial Reconciliation and as a Black evangelical who both disagrees with much of Cone’s theology and understands his critique of racism in the church, struggles with Cone in his article, “The significance of truth and love in authentic racial reconciliation: A Black evangelical’s appreciation of the theological contributions of James Cone.” Anderson highlights both the importance of truth telling in Cone’s unreserved discussion of White racism and the need for White evangelicals at least to hear Cone well on the question of racism. He further proposes that reconciliation is not possible apart from the willingness of Whites to hear the truth about the effects of racism on Blacks, including those who speak such truth with the type of “authentic rage” expressed by Cone.
Mary-Anne Plaatjies van Huffel argues, contra my own defense of reading and appropriating Cone in context, that the best approach to Cone’s Black liberation theology is a poststructuralist reading that centers the needs of the reader and decenters Cone’s own historical situation. Writing from her global location as a professor at the University of Stellenbosch and as an African feminist theologian, Van Huffel argues that Black liberation theology must embrace gender, class, race, national location, indigenization, and multiple other categories, as well as a clear understanding of the social construction of each of these categories, along with an understanding of the complexities of power available through poststructural analysis. In short, she argues for a decolonized reading of Cone and American Black theology toward a more global perspective.
Mark Glanville, in “James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree and Deuteronomy,” approaches Cone from the location of an Old Testament scholar and a jazz pianist. Glanville weaves together the beauty of the blues that emerged from the horrors of lynching with Cone’s theology of the Cross, showing that the horrible beauty of the Cross is evident in both the music of the blues and the law in Deuteronomy. Situating the law as the good that emerged from the horrors of slavery in Egypt, Glanville demonstrates the connections between Cone’s theology derived from the Black experience and the biblical narrative derived from the experience of God’s liberation of God’s people from slavery and the provision of a law that formed a specific type of community that affirmed social justice for the poor and oppressed.
Yvette Blair’s expository article, “Womanish and sassy: Remembrance, retelling, and liberation of her (Matthew 26:6–13),” engages Womanist theology in support of an interpretation of the woman who anointed Christ in Matthew 26. Blair works within the parameters of Womanist exegesis, which emerged out of the critique of Black women scholars who challenged both the ability of Cone and White feminist theologians to speak truth on their behalf. As such, Womanist theology and the advent of Womanist preaching and exposition are clearly an extension of Cone and Black theology, albeit a negative one. Blair’s work positions the biblical narrative around the woman, in contradiction to traditional tendencies to position the story around Christ and his disciples. In doing so she shifts the focus of the passage toward the liberation of the nameless woman who will, nonetheless, be remembered.
Cone held a central belief both that Black theology arose out of the music, stories, poetry, and the artistic life of the Black community and that Black artists often expressed theological truths in ways that are unavailable to academic theological discourse. DiAnne Malone, writing from her position as a Black woman, literary artist, and a professor of English and African American Studies, presents her exposition on the two Tamars, in Genesis 38 and in 2 Samuel 13, as a literary essay in which she artistically weaves together the story of her own ancestors with the stories of the two Tamars, offering a reading of the text that illustrates the lives of Black women both positively in the case of Genesis 38 and negatively in the case of 2 Samuel 13. Malone presents, in artistic form, what is difficult to imagine in technical exegesis or scholarly theological discourse, that perhaps sometimes liberation comes through personal action and at other times liberation may not come at all. The paradox between blessing and suffering is often best left as the biblical narrative leaves it: unresolved.
With this summary in mind, you are invited to a conversation with the authors as they converse with Cone. More than this, however, you are asked to join the conversation from whatever location you engage it. To advance the important work of interrogating our contemporary context and asking how we can speak of God in light of it, you are invited to read and be read in ways that move the conversation into another fifty years and beyond. If this issue can teach us anything, it is that there is still much to be said and, as Professor Hasan and Cone remind us, much to be done with what has been said.