By Dr. Stephen Ray
A friend of mine who currently leads a Center for Reconciliation at a major Divinity school tells a poignant story from his days at a small Christian college in California. As he tells the story, it was a late Spring afternoon and he was headed back to his room after class when he heard a cheer go up from the lounge in his dorm. Thinking that there was great baseball game he was missing he headed down to the lounge to see what all the excitement was about. The date was April 4, 1968 and the major news networks had just confirmed that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had died from the gunshot wound he received earlier while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine motel as he prepared to go to a church service being held in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. My friend headed back to his dorm room shaken by the news but more so by the response of his dorm mates, who all attended a small Christian college, in California.
When James Cone begins his seminal contribution to the work of Black Theology it is precisely in response to the general, yet sometimes malevolent, ambivalence that the theological academy in particular, and the larger white Christian community more generally has shown toward the physical safety and the material well-being of Black people in the United States and the world over. While the staunch opposition to the Civil Rights movement evident in vast numbers of Christian communities across the nation was but the contemporary expression of this ambivalence, we would do well to remember that violence toward Black people and their communities at the hands of “good Christian folk” has a long history in the United States. It is no coincidence that if one were to lay a grid of lynchings of Black people, burning of Black churches, and the destruction of many Black communities across a map of the United States that grid would tragically follow the contours of what we call today the Bible Belt. It is this tragedy to which Cone is responding. So, in the first instance his work is an effort to rescue the Christian faith from this sordid and tragic history of physical, economic, and cultural violence perpetrated by “good Christian folk” against Black people and Black communities and to confront the silence in the face of it by the theological academy.
James H. Cone is a Christian theologian trained in systematic theology at one of the finest schools of theology in the nation, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Thus, his engagement with this tragic corruption of the faith is through the theological exposition. Put another way, he writes theology. Within his theological work we find the righteous and prophetic rage against both the ambivalence of the theological academy toward the violence visited upon Black people and their communities by “good Christian folk.” This ambivalence was evident in the almost total absence of systematic reflection by theologians in journals, books, or academic proceedings on Civil Rights Movement and the violent reaction to it. There were few who raised the questions what it might mean to apply the Protestant Principle to the unholy fusion of race, religion, and nation apparent in the Christian identity of millions of Christians across the nation; or, what it might mean to reconstruct the doctrines of justification and sanctification in light of increasing violence by white Christians against their fellow Church people; or, what it might mean to revisit the doctrine of the Church in light of Sunday morning at 11 a.m. being the most segregated hour in American life; or, what it might mean to revisit the doctrine of eschatology in light of the common practice of segregating church graveyards; or, . . . You get the point. Instead, there were pronouncements and missives in church magazines about the times which treated them almost purely as current events and not as crises for the faith. Cone’s works God of the Oppressed and A Black Theology of Liberation are best understood, then, as his attempts to both challenge and reconstruct, systematically, the theological underpinnings of the Christian faith which had allowed the close cooperation of the faith with cultural practices and ideologies whose final results were violence against Black people and their communities. By challenging the ambivalence of the theological academy through reconstructing the doctrines of the faith with the evil of racism explicitly in view, Cone sought to articulate a faith worthy of the devotion of the faithful. In the end, if such a reconstruction is not done and if we are left with a faith that forms Christian folk whose response to the murder of a fellow Christian whose only crime was to believe that his nation could be better and that the Church might indeed lead the way, then perhaps we are as Paul opined, “the greatest fools among men.”
Dr. Stephen Ray is the Neal F . and Ila A. Fisher Professor of Systematic Theology at Garrett-Evangelical. To learn more about James H. Cone and the 2010 Academic Convocation at Garrett-Evangelical go to www.Garrett.edu/convocation.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
The Significance of James Cone
By Dr. Stephen Ray
As we prepare to welcome Dr. James H. Cone for the 2010 Academic Convocation, let us reflect on the importance of his work for the field of theology and for the Church. Cone might rightly be classed as one of the most significant North American theologians of the 20th century. His work has been influential in the development of numerous liberation theologies, Womanist theology and has been an important dialogue partner with North American and European political theologies. With the publication of his book Black Theology and Black Power Cone shifted the terms of theology in the West. His work accomplished this in two ways. The first was to expose the captivity of the Christian faith to the ideologies which maintained the system of racial oppression in the United States. The second was to place the lives of Black peoples and their communities at the center of theological reflection in a racist society as an act faithfulness to the historic faith. These two projects would then become the center and signature of the movement named Black Theology.
To fully appreciate Cone’s work it is necessary to revisit the particular historical moment in which Black Theology, as such, was born. The United States had just experienced one of the most dramatic transformations in its history as a nation. During the decade leading up to the publication of Black Theology and Black Power the modern Civil Rights Movement had reached its zenith. The legal system of segregation was being taken apart, bit by bit, and the cultural norms which underlie the system of Jim and Jane Crow were being transformed. The nation, as was most of the world, was being dramatically changed yet, in the field of theology in the United States was proceeding apace as if nothing new was happening. In seminary classrooms, at academic meetings, and journals the questions of the day were which side one might choose between neo-orthodoxy or the God is Dead movement—a debate about symbols and language. Or, the discourses raged around who one might find more affinity with Tillich or Barth. Or, the theological reflection focused on what Vatican II might mean for the Protestant church. Or . . . However one might finish this sentence it would most assuredly not have been about theological reflection on the struggles being waged by people of good faith against the systems of racial oppression which were destroying lives and communities of Black people specifically, and the soul of the nation more generally. And so it was in the decade leading up to the April 4, 1968.
Dr. Stephen Ray is the Neal F . and Ila A. Fisher Professor of Systematic Theology at Garrett-Evangelical. To learn more about James H. Cone and the 2010 Academic Convocation at Garrett-Evangelical go to www.Garrett.edu/convocation.
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| Dr. James H. Cone |
To fully appreciate Cone’s work it is necessary to revisit the particular historical moment in which Black Theology, as such, was born. The United States had just experienced one of the most dramatic transformations in its history as a nation. During the decade leading up to the publication of Black Theology and Black Power the modern Civil Rights Movement had reached its zenith. The legal system of segregation was being taken apart, bit by bit, and the cultural norms which underlie the system of Jim and Jane Crow were being transformed. The nation, as was most of the world, was being dramatically changed yet, in the field of theology in the United States was proceeding apace as if nothing new was happening. In seminary classrooms, at academic meetings, and journals the questions of the day were which side one might choose between neo-orthodoxy or the God is Dead movement—a debate about symbols and language. Or, the discourses raged around who one might find more affinity with Tillich or Barth. Or, the theological reflection focused on what Vatican II might mean for the Protestant church. Or . . . However one might finish this sentence it would most assuredly not have been about theological reflection on the struggles being waged by people of good faith against the systems of racial oppression which were destroying lives and communities of Black people specifically, and the soul of the nation more generally. And so it was in the decade leading up to the April 4, 1968.
Dr. Stephen Ray is the Neal F . and Ila A. Fisher Professor of Systematic Theology at Garrett-Evangelical. To learn more about James H. Cone and the 2010 Academic Convocation at Garrett-Evangelical go to www.Garrett.edu/convocation.
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