The Significance of James Cone, Part III

By Dr. Stephen Ray

James Cone sought not only to expose the captivity of the Christian faith in America to the regime of white supremacy but, also to begin the work of constructing a theology which was grounded in the lives and witness of the Black Christian community. More specifically, he sought to ground this work in those dimensions of Black communal life which bore witness to the workings of God’s Spirit in the midst of the struggle against the distortions of the faith which had come to characterize its practice in the United States. As mentioned in my previous blog, Cone’s project was initially to expose the ways that Christian theology, as an academic discipline, participated in the often violent oppression of Black persons and communities. With the publication A Black Theology of Liberation Cone’s project Black Theology, the first explicit work of Liberation Theology in North America, comes onto the scene in seminary classrooms and other venues around the world.

With A Black Theology of Liberation, Cone accomplishes three things. First, he gives lie to the reigning commonsense that the religious experiences of marginalized people, generally, and Black people, more specifically, have no value to the Christian tradition, save as quaint expressions of folk religion among the masses. Second, he develops a methodology which influences the development of a number of streams of constructive theology such as Womanist Theology, Second Wave Feminist Theology, Latin American Liberation Theology and Minjung Theology. These theological movements follow in his demand that theology take seriously both the existence of the least of these as prophetic critique against the temple theology ensconced in the theological academy precisely by taking seriously the intersections of race, culture, economics and religion as the critical principle which norms all its work in the contemporary world.

Beyond developing his work as prophetic critique, Cone mines the religious experience of Black peoples for the traces of the movement of the Spirit as sources for his constructive theological work. In books such as For My People, he engages in dialogue with the long tradition of the Black witness to the apostolic faith to identify those dimensions of its development witch both enhance and critique Black Theology as an academic project. It is precisely this engagement with the traditions of the Black Church which guards his work against the frequent, but unfounded, claims that Black Theology is little more than ideology cloaked in Christian trappings. In fact, it is precisely his dogged commitment to the frames and symbols of the Western theological tradition which exposes these particular critiques as being more committed to the maintenance of white normativity than to interpreting the Christian faith in our present era; an era largely structured by the working of racial and economic oppression.

If we were to name the significance of James H. Cone for the theological academy in the late modern era we might begin this way. Cone develops a theological methodology that deconstructs and critiques the captivity of the Christian faith to hegemonic forces of racial supremacy and economic exploitation. This work is done by exposing the false claims of universal humanity behind which exploitative constructions of normativity hide and in its place constructs a theological account of what it means to be human which begins exactly at the place where oppressed peoples experience their humanity in its fullest—at the intersection of oppression and human creativity in response to it. In Cone’s work this site is named Blackness but, as I have suggested many others have found that this methodology allows them to speak their humanity as well. So then, James Cone gives us a theological method that unmasks the powers and principalities of this age and gives voice to those suffering their terrible reign so that they might speak their humanity in the face of these powers. What could be more Christian than that?

---

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.