Introducing James H. Cone: A Personal Exploration

Abstract

When reflecting on the task of theology, the theologian Jürgen Moltmann once remarked that “Theology has at its heart only one problem: God”. It is worth noting I think, that so much theology throughout the years has approached the task of speaking about God as though only God mattered to the task of theology, and worse still as though God actually did theology. Yet, crucially, Moltmann continues: “Theologians will bring the whole of their existence into their search for knowledge about God”. It is the task of theology to engage all that we are, all that we see and know and experience and to bring that into dialogue with the truth that we as Christians name at the heart of our faith. When theology does this, pays attention to the world around it and within it, it reaches new depths and speaks of the living God afresh to each generation. For Black Christians to bring the whole of their existence into the search for knowledge about God, meant that power, class, race, and history become particularly relevant to our speech about God. What becomes clear in reading this personal exploration is that few have done theology such as this with the boldness and intellectual honesty of James H. Cone, and no one in Britain has called us to renewed engagement with Cone’s work in the way that Anthony G. Reddie has done in this powerfully lucid personal exploration. Reddie’s admiration of Cone is palpable – referring as he does to Cone as “arguably the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, and one of the greatest of all time”. (1). After reading this text, those engaging with this exploration will be inclined to agree. The author intends that this work will enable its readers to see the uniqueness of Cone’s voice and vision as a theologian speaking into a context in which Black people’s spiritual experiences and suffering were not taken seriously. This lack of attention to Black people’s experiences however did not mean that Black people were not doing theology amongst ourselves – making sense of a world in which we knew God to be active despite the suffering we have endured under racism and white supremacy. Cone long understood that Black folk have been doing theology, in some ways part of his genius was in enabling Black folk to call what they were already doing by that name, but what he particularly sought to interrogate and succeeded in critiquing was the “desecration of the very nature of Christian theology by the sin of White supremacy” (2). Black Liberation Theology is Cone’s response to the desecration of the very nature of Christian theology as he saw it. For Cone, any notion of God being on the side of the oppressor had to be overturned. God had to become Black because as Cone himself remarks: “There is no place in black theology for a colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color” (49). If God can be understood as Black, then all Black people can be seen as of inherent worth and value, and theology exercised in the face of racist violence would need to reflect this truth. Black liberation theology therefore takes the reality of God as a given, but goes further as Cone’s work in this exploration makes clear, to suggest that God does indeed take sides. God is not a metaphor, nor organizing principle, but enfleshed in the oppressed