[Martin Luther King Jr's] dependence on the analysis of love found in liberal theology and his confidence that the ‘universe is on the side of justice’ seem not to take seriously white violence in America. I disagreed with his conceptual analysis of violence and nonviolence, because his distinctions between these terms did not appear to face head-on the historical and sociological complexities of human existence in a racist society. James Cone, _God of the Oppressed_, 203

Tyler asked if I’d comment further on this critique, and as it connects to some previous posts of mine on nonviolence (I, II), I thought it’d be worth lingering on this criticism. 

Cone suggests that his theology is ”very similar to King’s despite our apparent difference[s]” (203). Both “recognize that a fight is on and black survival and liberation are at stake. Therefore, we do not need to debate the relative merits of certain academic distinctions between…violence and nonviolence” (203-204, emphasis added).

The distinction between violence and violence is academic for Cone in that it abstracts from the overwhelming violence of simply living in a racist world: “no one can be nonviolent in an unjust society” (201). When life itself is irreducibly linked to violent domination and oppression, the question at hand is not violence or nonviolence but the “creation of a new society” (202)–survival, and liberation.

For Cone, King errs in not taking account the violent constitutions of subjectivities in a racist world. To be is already a violent affair and to frame the discussion of ethics and life between the imagined options of violence or nonviolence is to misunderstand the history that shapes our social existence.

The question, for Cone, and he thinks also, at the core, for King, is not about an ethical program based on “good and evil, right and wrong.” Instead, the basis of action is the decision “between the old and the new age” (206). For Cone, we bear witness to the new age most fundamentally not by nonviolence, which is ultimately an ethical abstraction, but by participating in Christ’s present work to overthrow oppression and create “a new humanity” (203).

[Martin Luther King Jr's] dependence on the analysis of love found in liberal theology and his confidence that the ‘universe is on the side of justice’ seem not to take seriously white violence in America. James Cone, _God of the Oppressed_, 203

Koinonia is limited to the victims of oppression and does not include the oppressors. ibid, 189

If violence versus nonviolence is not the issue [b/c nobody can be nonviolent in an unjust society] but, rather, the creation of a new humanity, then the critical question for Christians is not whether Jesus committed violence or whether violence is theoretically consistent with love and reconciliation. We repeat: the question is not what Jesus did…but what is he doing. ibid, 204, 201

The ethic of liberation arises out of love, for ourselves and for humanity. ibid, 199

For Cone, the hesitancy to speak of love, especially love of the oppressor, arises from the temptation to treat Christ’s love as if it were “indifferent to social and political justice” (208). Love not only has the possibility of forgiving and leaving intact the structures of oppression (and the power of the oppressors); it has in fact been the central motivating vision from which such structures of domination arose. The “civilizing” Christian mission was a work of love.

How then, for Cone, does one speak of love in a world in which peoples were conquered for love and oppressors ask to be pardoned from any responsibility and left with their riches and power for the sake of this same love?

Cone, ultimately, places liberation at the forefront of his thought, for without the “hope for the creation of a new society for all,” without “the creation of a new humanity in America” (202, 203), love remains an impossible venture; it remains the justifying word of the oppressors. The “ethics of liberation arises out of love,” that is, liberation is ordered to and for the sake of love, culminates in love, because the possibility of love will arise, new, only from liberation.

Of course, black theology is aware of the danger of identifying the word of human beings with the word of God, the danger Karl Barth persuasively warned against in the second decade of this century:

“Form believes itself capable of taking the place of content… Man has taken the divine in his possession; he has brought [God] under his management.”

…..

To apply Barth’s words to the black-white context and interpret them as a warning against identifying God’s revelation with black culture is to misunderstand Barth. His warning was appropriate for the situation in which it was given, but not for blacks in America. Blacks need to see some correlations between divine salvation and black culture…

To be sure, as Barth pointed out, God’s word is alien to humanity and thus comes to it as a “bolt from the blue”–but which humanity? For oppressors, dehumanizers, the analysis is correct. However, when we speak of God’s revelation to the oppressed, the analysis is incorrect. God’s revelation comes to us in and through the cultural situation of the oppressed. God’s word is our word; God’s existence, our existence. This is the meaning of black culture and its relationship to divine revelation.

Black culture, then, is God’s way of acting in America, God’s participation in black liberation (_A Black Theology of Liberation_, 40th Anniversary edition, p. 29-30).

It goes without saying–and Cone would agree, in fact, insist–that we can’t simply take this quote and apply it to life today: it was written in and for a particular situation, over 40 years ago (with its gendered language, the singularity of “black culture,” etc). This contextualization, however, is one of his major points: the relationship between God and humankind–or revelation and culture–cannot be considered abstractly or dealt with as a generic, universal problem. Christ is really alive and present, identified with and acting among and for the oppressed. And this means that the appropriateness of any theological statement depends on how it relates to God’s liberating actions in that particular situation.

What do you think?

I begin by asserting once more that Jesus was a Jew. It is on the basis of the soteriological meaning of the particularity of his Jewishness that theology must affirm the christological significance of Jesus’ present blackness. He is black because he was a Jew. James Cone, God of the Oppressed, 123.

For many, coming from a variety of theological perspectives, talk of “the Black Christ” is scandalous–and not in the sense that Gospel is a scandal. I want to unpack Cone’s defense of his claim, suggesting that what Cone should say, at the end, is: Christ is black because he is a Jew.

The claim that Jesus is Black “is derived primarily from Jesus’ past identity, his present activity, and his future coming” (122). Jesus’ past, his historicity, is the ground and starting point for any claim about Jesus, God, and humankind (106-110). So Cone begins by restating again that Jesus was a Jew. Israel was elected by God as the people through whom God would liberate God’s creation from the powers of sin, death, and slavery.

Although Cone uses the term “racial” for Jesus’ Jewish identity, the promises of God given to Israel–to be “a light to the nations” (Isa 42.6; quoted p. 124)–open up its Jewish particularity towards other peoples in a way beyond any racially conceived identity. The “divine freedom revealed in Israel’s history is now available to all” in Christ, and this does not negate “the divine election of Israel” but affirms it (124).

Israel’s own life unfolds within God’s commitment to liberate all creation from bondage. Christ is no figure trapped in the past but is present in and with the “little ones” struggling for freedom. His Jewishness allows other oppressed peoples–in America, people of color, and for Cone, Black people in particular–to articulate their own struggles within his covenantal life. Jesus’ Jewishness means that God stands in solidarity with the poor, or, in Cone’s words, “that black people are God’s poor people whom Christ has come to liberate” (125). Because Jesus is the Jew who has affirmed and fulfilled Israel’s covenantal calling, Jesus “really enters into our world where the poor, the despised, and the black are” (125). Jesus is at work in our world, identifying himself with the despised, bearing their burdens, and bringing them to the freedom of human life with God.

To say that Jesus is Black because Jesus is a Jew is to say that black life is the location–in America–in which the Jewish Savior is found. To say that Jesus is Black is to acknowledge that there is no knowledge of God, or Christ, apart from Christ’s present work in the actual struggles of oppressed people today. It is also to acknowledge that blackness has been opened up as a repetition of the covenantal openness of Jewish identity (to the point where Cone envisions the conversion of white people as their becoming black). God’s liberation of creation today–God’s gift of freedom and full, abundant life–occurs at the site and in the lives of black people affirming their full humanity in a racist society.

In the course of a facebook conversation on the video, I said,

This “critique” of “religion” and endorsement of (personal) faith in Jesus should be set within the longer discourse of Christian universalism and its articulation of religion/religions as failed approximations of itself. It is universalizing in scope, both in its account of religion and in its inability to see and accept its own historical contingency and particularity.

All I want to do is try to explain this terse statement.

For centuries (since the medieval understanding of the world, including religion, was shaken to the core by the discovery of new lands and peoples), Christians have been reflecting on the nature of religion (here’s a previous, related post). The conclusion was given at the outset: Christianity (as a civilization) was the highest, most authentically human, and divinely chosen form of life. All other forms of life were deviations, departures, failed approximations, or in some other way deficient manifestations of this universal Christian life. The category of “religion” explained Christian civilization’s superiority to all others (and numerous “definitions” of religion were offered to meet this demand throughout the centuries).

In this video, the poem defines religion as an antitype of Christianity (religion is -X but Christianity is X). Christianity stands, again, in a unique position of superiority. No longer the apex of religion, it is outside that field of human failure called religion altogether. Christianity overcomes the failures of religion and opens up the true form of human life all peoples desire (or should desire). The video thus stands in continuity with this longer Christian discourse of religion.

This account of religion is universalizing in two ways. It claims to give an account of religion, and hence all religions, and thus can claim to know in advance the true story of all people, itself and “others,” without any open discussion with them. Secondly, it is universalizing in that it has no sense of its own historical particularity. It takes its own peculiar definition of and distaste for religion as universal. It takes its own individualized account of faith (grace, moral striving accompanied by public confession of weakness, desire for authenticity, etc) as ahistorical, generic, ideal human norms.

The video is beset by numerous other problems (self-contradictory in its judgement against judgmental religious people; poor use of Scripture; random disconnected thoughts; hints of anti-semitism; etc). So why is it so popular now?

A partial answer is that it solves a current political dilemma for a certain evangelical-ish Christian population. It challenges the ideological use of Christianity by Republicans like Rick Perry while preserving and masking its own pretenses to universality. In other words, it jettisons the particular cultural forms of “Republican Christianity” (a good thing, no doubt) while allowing them to miss the fact that they are substituting one particular cultural formation for another (their own). Through the “abolition” of religion and endorsement of faith in Christ, adherents are able to wash their hands of the sin of religion (wars, social conservatism, etc) while still retaining their privileged place in the religious world Christians invented.

James Cone offers an important challenge to every criticism of ideology. He says, 

Checks against ideological language in theology are not derived abstractly from the Word of God [as Barth does], because God’s Word is not an abstract object, but is the liberating Subject in the lives of the oppressed struggling for freedom. I believe that some of my critics would probably agree with that linguistic formulation. But the real test of the referent in the formulation is found in whether we are led to be involved on the same side in the historical struggles for freedom. (93).

For Cone, theology becomes “abstract” when it “overlooks the oppressed and the hope given by Jesus Christ in their struggle” (117-118). Jesus is not an idea, not a past event, not an ethical model; Jesus is the divine event of liberation in the lives of the oppressed today and any theology that does not originate from this concrete presence of Christ is abstract. This may sound good abstractly, and so the real test, Cone says, is whether their lives will be shaped by the knowledge that they can only live as Christians by joining the oppressed in their struggle for freedom.

There is no universal antidote to ideology–in fact, the attempt to procure one is itself ideological (I have some questions about apocalyptic theology on this front, for it tries to solve the problem of ideology by calling everything human hopelessly ideological–sinful, religious). The discernment about when and how to identify our work with God’s salvific act of liberation depends on the concrete determination of the situation (89).

For Cone, then, theological reflection originates from (and does not descend to) this problem. Theological thought is the attempt to clarify how, in a specific context, God has tabernacled with the oppressed: taking on their burdens, electing their struggle as God’s own, and sustaining their hope for a future world of freedom beginning here and now.

God’s Word is a poetic happening, an evocation of an indescribable reality in the lives of the people. James Cone, God of the Oppressed, p. 17.

James Cone wonderfully situates theological work within the realm of human artistic production: theology is a creative response to an active, living presence, the “event of liberation” that is Jesus Christ (32).

Viewing theology as a creative work allows one to quite clearly see and understand the contextual determination of theology. I was reading James Baldwin a few days ago, and he mentions the limits of Faulkner’s portrayals of African-American life. Faulkner had no access to the world “behind the veil” (Du Bois) and thus, understandably, could not depict African-American life in its robust and complicated fullness. It’s not a criticism but simply an observation: our imaginative abilities stem from and therefore are limited by our social location.

For Cone, theology is a creative work. It is not an analysis of certain concepts or a particular grammar but is instead a living and embodied response to the subject of theology, Jesus Christ (32). It is, therefore, obviously dependent on our social location.

The “indescribable” event of liberation claims us completely and thus frees us to respond poetically (16), in the rhythms of our bodies (21) and “the emotions of language” (18).  Theological work is a way of participating in Christ’s liberating work for and with the oppressed, and it therefore builds from worship (18), praxis (34), and the fullness of our embodied and “earthy” lives (22). Christ’s gift of liberation is a gift in and to this world. We participate in it with our entire lives, and thus, within the limits and therefore the freedom of our creaturely imaginations. Evocation–and not “explication” or even “witness”–best describes the creative human activity we call theology.

The first is a fantastic article by Serene Jones, the president at Union Seminary, who recently added Cornel West to their faculty. In her article, she says,

Only a few days after protesters first took over Zuccotti Park, in fact, students came to me seeking permission to fly the UTS banner down in lower Manhattan, and show support for the then-few who were camped out there. I immediately approved, reminding them Union has a long history of supporting movements which address issues of poverty and justice, ranging from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a UTS student in 1930) who fought the Nazis in his native Germany, to more contemporary issues like Civil Rights, Women’s Right, the Vietnam War and South African Apartheid. Our seminarians have been in the vanguard for each.

The second is a piece from Duke Divinity’s Faith and Leadership blog, written by Melissa Wiginton from Austin Presbyterian Seminary. She says,

There is so much we cannot do. Church institutions and congregations are not in the business of politics or community organizing for political action. And we don’t have money with which to buy influence. Do we have a public voice that is heard beyond its echo within our own networks? Are we just talking to ourselves?

What shall we do? For me, first, I have to remember that my hope for the mending of the world rests on God’s doing, not on me getting this place straightened out. I’m not sure what’s next. I will learn more, get out of the house and try to pay attention to what God is up to in the world.

The contrast between the two pieces is clear enough and I mostly just wanted to draw attention to both pieces. However, one can quickly note how, for Jones, that the church is neither “separated from” the movement nor its central force. They have been in, that is, part of the vanguard.

For Wiginton, there is the strong sense that all these movements are happening outside the church. Though she finds it lamentable, one catches a sense of sorrow, kind of like the kid watching the other kids play in the park and trying to gain the courage to go join in their games. But the rules are so confusing, and it isn’t clear that they want to play with us anyways…

Secondly, one can capture the social location from which Wiginton writes as she says that church institutions aren’t getting politically involved with their money or their bodies. Obviously, Jones’ article–and Cornel West’s new role there–make it clear that some churches are in the habit of doing just that. And, let’s not forget, every church makes demands on the bodies and money of their congregants and pastors.

Finally, it’s not Jones but Wiginton who claims to know what direction OWS and the world ought to be moving:

We see the horizon beyond Zuccotti Park. It’s Zion, the City of God where everyone has what they need and more to share, just because generosity brings real joy. But how does hope from the City of God occupy our cities here? The question twists us up as leaders of institutions because it is so hard to know what to do and then to actually do anything.

This faint eschatological hope–Zion–is so debilitating because it gives her the sense that she knows what should come but lacks any solid guidance as to how to make it come about.

For Jones, on the other hand, the impetus to action is not from some abstract sense of what the world ought to look like but from the knowledge that God is present and moving with the poor:  “It is with the neediest, Jesus told his disciples, that God is alive and on the move.”

One can raise a lot of questions about the kind of theological formation happening at Austin Pres., Union, and Duke from these articles. I admit that this kind of schematic either-or in which Jones is the clear winner is a bit unfair. But I think the contrasts are important and open up a whole field of questions about seminary education today.

STILL HERE 

I’ve been scarred and battered.
My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me, sun has baked me,
Looks like between ‘em
They done tried to make me
Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’–
But I don’t care!
I’m still here!

For those of you who missed it, another Hughes poem has been floating around in the political sphere, oddly quoted by Republican presidential candidates who seem not to realize what the poem is saying. Here’s an article about it, and here’s a section from the poem, Let America Be America Again.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

The language of “the 99%” is a welcome relief to the previous talk of “Wall St.” v. “Main St,” or the even more invidious but similar language of “real Americans.” Main St., Main St. America, Real America all conjur up images of white, small town, midwestern America. The language of “the 99%” by its very breadth can’t build on this implicitly racial nationalism. To use some other mathematical language: it allows a reorganization of political energy away from the mythical “mean” or “average” citizen.

Occupy Wall St. is still in its early stages; the strike in Oakland next week is a major push forward. Besides crediting OWS with shifting talks from “deficits” to “inequality,” OWS deserves credit for pushing political language away from the incessant talk about and attempts to produce the exemplary image of “real America.” Perhaps this helps explain the continual attempts to construct an “image” of the “typical” OWS protester (young, drug using, simultaneously unnaturally lazy and angry, with dreadlocks–meaning dirty…). OWS is bypassing and thereby diminishing the political saliency of this “image” of an average citizen. As such, it starts dismantling the racial nationalism implicit in the idea of “real America.”