Last Month — April 28 – America lost one of its best theologians in Rev. James Hal Cone. Cone was known as the founder of Black liberation theology, and was the Bill and Judith Moyers Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary. Cone has several published works to his credit, his most recent notable published work being, “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.”
Cone’s life is particularly important to Black America because he embodied intellectual and prophetic excellence in scriptural interpretation and practical theological application in society. Through his writings and teachings, Black Americans who identify with Christianity finally had a theologian who skillfully, authoritatively and rightly divided the scriptures to reflect God as being identified and concerned with their experience here in America. His writings and teachings on Black Liberation Theology in the 1960s was born out of a crisis of faith as the Black Power movement was playing out in the social backdrop. For him, his faith had to permit him to be unapologetically Black and Christian. Christian theology had to be able to speak to the lived realities of Blacks who are subjugated, oppressed and bombarded with persistent social messages of inferiority.
Black Liberation Theology exposed white supremacy as the biggest sin undermining the Western, specifically American church’s witness. Christianity in America has a way of presenting salvation universally at the expense of salvation’s contextual reality. This is particularly true in America when it comes to race and racism. The church talks about the good news of salvation of eternal life in Christ but struggles to share the good news about what Christ has done and has to say about racism in America. In the Gospels, Christ consistently dealt with the larger need of salvation, and the immediate needs of people at the same time. He said, “which is easier, for me to say, ‘your sins be forgiven you,’ or, ‘rise take up your bed and walk’” (Luke 5:17-23). The consistent oversight of the American church to ignore, and thereby perpetuate racism and white supremacy in our country undermines the church’s witness.
Despite Cone’s major contributions to Christian theology in America, many who attend Black churches have never heard of him. He dealt very pointedly with a societal sin in this country that many Christians (Black or white) are unwilling to grapple with. One of the biggest concerns plaguing Black churches today, is that many of its ministers who flock to seminaries are being inseminated with a theology that ignores or omits the contextualized good news to marginalized, oppressed and subjugated peoples in their ministerial preparation. So much so that when social sins of police brutality, environmental racism as in Flint, Michigan, or the prison industrial complex, a host of Black ministers are ill-equipped to deal with these societal sins because they have effectively been trained in theologies that have nothing to say about it. They have unwittingly been trained in theologies designed consciously or unconsciously to maintain and perpetuate White supremacy. In a very similar way, many Black pastors and ministers who have never had formal theological training will still be inclined to be more familiar with a Charles Spurgeon, A.W. Tozer, or C.S. Lewis, than Dr. James H. Cone. The good news is contextual. Jesus did not address blindness when the immediate need before him was leprosy.
Now more than ever, an overwhelming contextualized sound is required from one of the Black community’s historically most important institutions, the Black church. Indeed, the American church as a whole! Cone has bequeathed a prophetic, authoritative and contextualized theology that can and will be useful to the church in America to directly address the social sin of race, which has plagued this country since its inception.
