JAMES CONE'S THEOLOGY OF CULTURE IN BLACK THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION

Abstract

The paper examines James Cone's construction of the black cultural self in his Black Theology of Liberation (1970). Informed by Paul Tillich's idea of context and correlation, Cone seeks to embed African Americans in a social/cultural context in which they can still negotiate a rewarding and theologically validated cultural identity.

Headnote

Abstract: The paper examines James Cone's construction of the black cultural self in his Black Theology of Liberation (1970). Informed by Paul Tillich's idea of context and correlation, Cone seeks to embed African Americans in a social/cultural context in which they can still negotiate a rewarding and theologically validated cultural identity.

Keywords: black theology, contextual theology, liberation theology

1. Introduction

James Cone represents an important milestone in the development of African American religious thought, as he markedly heralds the advent of black theology. It embodies a logical extension of black activism in the 1960s into the realm of theology that parallels cultural, social, and political endeavours, such as the Black Arts movement and the Civil Rights movement, stemming from the black community, but also internationally, the decolonization of the third world, the birth of Latin American liberation theology, the emergence of third world economic theories (see Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory [1974]), among others. Cone's theology is undoubtedly embedded in the political upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s and derives its energies from it. One of his founding documents of black theology, Black Theology of Liberation (1970), reveals that, besides quite a number of series of events in the period, formative influences encompass the advent of the Black Power movement, the appearance of militant Black Muslim agendas, the radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement, including claims of reparations from the white church for centuries' of support of white racism, i.e., for "exploiting] our resources, our minds, our bodies, our labor" (Forman 2004: 70). Beyond grounding a theological discipline, Cone contributes to the contemporary discourse on culture and authenticity, which ultimately forms the main focus of his biblical criticism and around which his critique of contemporary (white) theology evolves.

2. Cone's theology of culture in Black Theology of Liberation (1970)

Much as he seeks to depart from white theology, it is mainly Barth and Tillich who serve for him as points of departure. Especially, Tillich's contextual theology proves useful in establishing a black theological discourse, as it insists on a view of the relation between theology and culture through a method of correlation, which "explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence" (Tillich 1951: 60). For Tillich (1987: 25), this leads to "an actuality of meaning that convulses everything and builds everything anew". Based on such understanding, Tillich "identifies culture", in Russell Re Manning's (2013: 441) words, "with the self-interpretive function of humanity, or the manifestation in history of the human spirit", from which a theology of culture evolves: "Theology is the synthesis of religion and culture, that is to say, the synthesis of two attitudes towards conditioned form and unconditioned Gehalt present in religion and culture" (Manning 2005: 122).

Taking Tillich's existentialist approach to theology and culture as the foundation for black theologizing, Cone's contextual theology builds on the collective experience of the African American community, including cultural traditions and social displacement as well as the black reading of the Bible. This echoes later conceptions of contextual theologies that centre on what Stephen B. Bevans (1985: 186) summarizes as "a way of doing theology that takes into account four things: (1) the spirit and message ofthe Gospel; (2) the tradition ofthe Christian people; (3) the culture of a particular nation or region; and (4) social change in that culture, due both to technological advances on the one hand and struggles for justice and liberation on the other". Correlation in his case is not a mere tool to achieve a synthesis of religion and culture in the sense that it would aim at disclosing universals, as it is supposed in contextual theologies: "The correlating enterprise assumes some discoverable universal human reality - some structure of human existence or some essential human characteristic - upon which the theological edifice can be constructed" (Grenz 2000: 41). In Cone's interpretation of Tillich's correlation, it refers to blackening of the Christian God:

Blacks need to see some correlations between divine salvation and black culture. For too long Christ has been pictured as a blue-eyed hanky. Black theologians are right: we need to dehonkify him and thus make him relevant to the black condition. (Cone 2010: 29)

Cone identifies racist America, but, in fact, a racist white attitude globally, as the "concrete situation of concern" (Tillich 1951: 111), i.e., he is embedding his theology in the conditioned form of socio-cultural reality and making blackness the unconditioned content - much as the unconditioned content remains overdetermined in one direction, which seems a contradiction in terms.

Explicitly stating that "God's revelation comes to us in and through the cultural situation of the oppressed" (2010: 30), Cone is thus ready to defocalize traditional theological approaches to the Bible by connecting the gospel and the Barthian Christological concept of revelation to the black experience: "Black culture, then, is God's way of acting in America, God's participation in black liberation" (idem: 30). In an act of monopolizing God, Cone then identifies blackness, i.e., the black community, history, and culture, as both the source and the content, as well as the epistemological tool for reaching God: "If God is not for us, if God is not against white racists, then God is a murderer, and we had better kill God" (idem: 28).

It must be noted that Barth (1962: 338) sees culture as an obstacle, because "culture means humanity" that results from the fallenness of humans, and thus "culture implies lack and consciousness of lack. It means seeking through men and failing to find the unity of God" (idem: 339). Barthian Christology in fact envisions believers in the Church representing unity in Christ as a result of the work of "the eternal Logos" (idem: 343) having overcome human culture. Indeed, as Robert J. Palma (1983: 12) sums it up: "For Barth, culture is to be measured finally by the Word of God"; and, similarly, in Paul Louis Metzger's (2003: 53) coinage: "Culture can serve as a sign, but not as the substance of revelation itself'.

The book was born in a time of social, political, and cultural/racial turmoil, which also explains the heightened need that, in Diana L. Hayes's (2000: 618) words, "[i]n order for Black theology to be Black and in touch with the Black community, which is its source, it must use the symbols that come from that community rather than attempt to develop new ones that are alien to that community"; Cone's concept of culture shows that his early theology clearly remains on the level of the conditioned and is unsuccessful to relate to the unconditioned - the ultimately "hidden" or infinite, unconditioned realm in Tillich's footsteps. While the concept of blackness is addressed as an ontological category - an essentially abstract entity that Cone outspokenly fights against, it proves to be cultural and expresses social constructedness, which presents a danger for his theology, i.e., that of becoming "narrowly focused upon its own social setting" (Grenz 2000: 43) - a threat for contextual theologies, identified by Stanley J. Grenz. Blackness in this way leaves the ontological and becomes political:

It is the power to love oneself precisely because one is black and a readiness to die if whites try to make one behave otherwise. [. . .] The 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. We know, of course, that getting rid of evil takes something more than burning down buildings, but one must start somewhere. (Cone 2010: 26)

The almost cynical remark devises a clearly political orientation, which can hardly be considered theologically grounded without scriptural support. Quite the contrary, when Cone, in the same chapter, characterizes the black soul through "the pain and the joy of reacting to whiteness and affirming blackness" (28), the joy seems to derive from throwing Molotov cocktails and "killing slave masters" (27), as he does not mention any other type of reaction.

The passionate language of commitment (Cone 2010: 18), which presents "forms of language as they arise out of the Black context" (Hayes 2000: 628) of the time, is undeniably influenced by the militant Black Power movement. It accounts for the harshness of communication and the ideologically-informed theological position that he takes:

God comes to those who have been enslaved and abused and declares total identification with their situation, disclosing to them the rightness of their emancipation on their own terms. God not only reveals to the oppressed the divine right to break their chains by any means necessary, but also assures them that their work in their own liberation is God's own work. (Cone 2010: 48)

The non-restriction of means curiously reminds one of Malcolm X's speech in 1965, which reveals the homogenizing capacity of blackness into one community - even void of confessional or otherwise religious differences. As Rev. Calvin Marshall states: "Christ was a Malcolm X" (Chapman 2006: 85). The powerful intragroup networking along the lines of Black Nationalism is superimposed on theological purity. Quite obviously, his ethnorelative approach is in danger of becoming ethnocentric, when Cone states that

The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black selfdetermination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God's experience, or God is a God of racism. [. . .] The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition God's own condition. This is the essence of the Biblical revelation. By electing Israelite slaves as the people of God and by becoming the Oppressed One in Jesus Christ, the human race is made to understand that God is known where human beings experience humiliation and suffering. [. . .] Liberation is not an afterthought, but the very essence of divine activity. (2010: 63-64)

The concept of liberation on the basis of the foregoing derives from the black experience in the racist climate of America and undergoes narrowing, to the point of excluding further possible theological discourses, to suit the black theologian's ideological needs. As an effective counterstrike, Cone inverts the colour politics and thereby establishes a theological anthropology of difference: "I am black because God is black!" (2010: 80).

It must be noted, though, that in his later works, he softens toward the question of whiteness and envisions interracial/intercultural collaboration globally. As he confesses in his Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation: "I think the time has come for black theologians and black church people to move beyond a mere reaction to white racism in America and begin to extend our vision of a new socially constructed humanity in the whole inhabited world. [. . .] For humanity is whole, and cannot be isolated into racial and national groups" (Cone 1999: 46). The approach Cone takes to culture in this later work resembles Barth's ultimate view of culture. For Barth (1962: 343) "reconciliation in Christ is the restoration of the lost promise" and, in this sense, culture, much as he sees it as the limit, is a means to enable this unity and thus it represents a promise:

The term culture connotes exactly that promise to man: fulfilment, unity, wholeness within his sphere as creature, as man, exactly as God in his sphere is fullness, wholeness, Lord over nature and spirit, Creator of heaven and earth. (Barth 1962: 343).

(Black) culture then holds a promise for humanity, not just for the oppressed.

In Black Theology of Liberation, however, comprehensive as Cone may claim his attempt to be, there are quite a number of inconsistencies that blur any such understanding. Cone himself (2010: xx) refers to some of the issues in his 1986 preface, when he raises the issue of class and sexism that would inevitably shade his concept of blackness. Truly enough, one only needs to think of Barbara Johnson's (1986: 169) tetrapolar conceptualization of African American women to see that the African American community is as varied as any other, and any simplifying attempt to insist on the homogeneity of the black community is to deny the variedness of the black experience. In the same fashion, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s chastising of black churches for their inadequate support of the Civil Rights issue reveals class differences, very much apparent in the 1960s (see, e.g., "A Knock at Midnight" [1967]).

The lack of ingroup complexity prepares a trap of ideological entanglement, which may be evaded on the sole basis of the apologetic note that Cone himself makes in his "Postscript to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition": "A Black Theology of Liberation was written for a specific time and place. No one can understand this book apart from the social and political context in which it was written" (2010: 153). It seems yet problematic to present the black community as one unified religious community as is the case. When describing black culture heroes as judges, Cone identifies Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Malcolm X as leaders who "represent the 'soul' of blackness, and what blacks mean by black liberation. They are the black judges endowed with the spirit of Yahweh for the sole purpose of creating a spirit of freedom among their people" (2010: 51). Malcolm X especially reveals the uncritical acceptance of African American (political) action as a black religio-cultural performance. As is well-known, Malcolm X, initially an adherent of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and later a hajj-convert to Sunni Islam, embodies one of the most prominent Muslim leaders within the African American community, while representing an authentic culture hero for both Christian and Muslim blacks. Yet, his inclusion as a prophet of black theology can hardly be defended, given the fact that it is black Christian God-talk that Cone seeks to establish. Ultimately, presenting the black community as unified on the basis of the common traumatic experience of racial discrimination may be argued for, but much less as a unified religious community, as the very example of Malcolm X reveals.

Blackness proves to be the arch metaphor for Cone to identify oppression and the imperative of liberation. The discursive move, however, builds on a doubleness that forces him to defend his position in later works. Notably, he is quick to demonstratively include whites in the Christian discourse, by claiming in his My Soul Looks Back that "I firmly believe that the gospel is available to all people-including white people" (Cone 1986: 13). Yet, this and his previous Black Theology and Black Power (1969) are written in the characteristic social and political climate of the late 1960s and thus ethnocentric features inevitably creep into their conceptualization. So while Cone (2010: 9) insists that "Blackness, then, stands for all victims of oppression who realize that the survival of their humanity is bound up with liberation from whiteness" - and thereby allows for a broad interpretation of colour, but in fact, the racial binary becomes a way of othering and the tactics establishes a contrast that unites anything different from it. The non-stratification of the white outgroup is just as problematic and is reminiscent of Black Muslim demonization of whites as a whole.

As for liberation, Cone (2010:2) claims that "The election is inseparable from the event of the exodus" and connects in this way chosenness to the state of oppression, as "God is revealed as the God of the oppressed, involved in their history, liberating them from human bondage" (ibidem). The palpable parallel between the Israeli and the African American community functions as a promise to be fulfilled, as exodus shall equal liberation from racial but, in that, from social, economic, and political injustice (ibidem) for African Americans. Exodus, however, led to the Mount of Sinai, and then strengthened with the Covenant, Israel settled in a land that had been inhabited by other peoples. Although biblical criticism has revealed that, in the course of the settlement, the Israeli tribes did not occupy the land at once and that their settling took place in uninhabited areas between the Canaanite city-states and even the Israelis became subjected to them (see Soggin 1987: 189), the settling seems, on the basis of the biblical account, a triumphant entry, which involved wiping out inhabitants. As stated in the promise to Abraham in Genesis 17:8,

The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God (New International Version).

The passage shows Israel as a foreigner to the land, which also means that their settlement on the land was going to uproot people already living there, as well as that the God of the oppressed was the same as the God of conquerors. It seems that there is a twist of perspectives at hand and that the central element is the covenant, which is made with a people and not with circumstances, grave as they may be. On these grounds, one cannot but agree with Cone (2010: 2) that "it may not be entirely clear why God elected Israel to be God's people".

Cone's early black theology seeks to cater to the needs of the oppressed black Americans, but in so doing it strives for more than what it can achieve at this point in this book. By employing his grand metaphor of blackness for the oppressed globally, Cone fails to acknowledge the consequence of his own starting point, namely that speaking contextually means being contextual. As Lourdino A. Yuzon (1994: online) puts it,

A contextual theology that emerges out of a particular context is something that makes sense in relation to a certain place and time and, therefore, can be definite, at best, but not definitive.

Carrying the idea of contextual theology further, Robert J. Schreiter (2002: 22) describes local theology as "the dynamic interaction among gospel, church, and culture". Other black theologians, as, e.g., Deotis Roberts, who already in the 1970s speaks of the double oppression of women, thereby further stratifying the issue of oppression, acknowledge the situatedness of theology and the necessity to include local characteristics and constraints in theological discussions:

There is no completely universal perspective, since all human thought and belief are limited by structural bounds [and] theology cannot be truly universal if it refuses to deal with the particularities of the human situation. (Roberts 1976: online).

The later Cone is undoubtedly aware of the implications when he acknowledges the differences between the liberation theologies of Africa, Latin America, and the US (see My Soul Looks Back (1986)). No doubt Cone rectifies his position in his "Preface to the 1986 Edition" of A Black Theology of Liberation, when he, after all, makes the missing intercultural move and thus opens up to the universal condition of humans, by asserting apologetically that "We are all-blacks and whites, men and women, young and old-sinners, and thus capable of exploiting the poor in order to promote our economic and political interests" (2010: xxii). The later, clarifying amendments here recycle his statements that may distort his ultimate aim. Thus, when he insists that

by electing Israelite slaves as the people of God and by becoming the Oppressed One in Jesus Christ, the human race is made to understand that God is known where human beings experience humiliation and suffering" (Cone 2010: 67)

he declares that God is there in the/any wilderness too, just as He was there for the Israelite slaves in the desert, and that Christology makes sense there too, as the revelation becomes a "black-event" (2010: 5).

3. Conclusion

In this work, Cone performs what he later acknowledges - in Barth's (1962: 340) words:

When we hear God we are not free, but are completely chained and bound in our thoughts and in our words. Chained and bound because we ourselves when we hear God are already within the Church. But we are also within culture. From inside both we must question and from inside both we must answer.

The real revolutionary thought in Cone's theology of culture lies thus in bringing liberation and culture together, thereby contextualizing the gospel in an always relevant contemporary framework.

Sidebar

Péter Gaál-Szabó is a college Professor at the Foreign Languages Department of the Debrecen Reformed Theological University, Hungary. He holds a Ph.D. and a Habilitation degree in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Debrecen (UD), Hungary. His research focuses on African American culture, cultural spaces, religio-cultural identity, and intercultural communication. He is author of "Ah done been tuh de horizon and back": Zora Neale Hurston's Cultural Spaces in "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and "Jonah's Gourd Vine" (Peter Lang, 2011).

E-mail address: [email protected]

References

References

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