A Black Theology of Liberation

Thanks to the fiery Jeremiah Wright, a lot of people have now heard of Black Liberation Theology. Thanks to the yucky neo-cons, most of them have no idea what it is. With the American Congress hyperventilating over the problems of the rich with the financial market crash (but NOT responding with similar speed or concern over the problems of the poor), Cone's foundational work has never had so much relevance. When he said black liberation theology is about "destoying everything America loves," he's not talking, after all, about fried chicken or family reunions. He's talking about our love affair with money, power and self-righteousness. A book that well deserves its status as a classic.

This is a clever attempt to redefine and broaden the white Christian theological tent so that it becomes humane enough to embrace black and other liberation causes of the oppress. It correctly defines northern liberal theology as being independent of black suffering; and southern conservative theology as being defined so that it is compatible with white racism. While all this is trivially true, the larger issue remains unaddressed. It is that Reverend Cone's enterprise cannot succeed because there are larger issues involved that transcend and are prior to theology itself. The most economical, if not the best way to describe them is by using Ernest Becker's idea of a "hero system." According to Becker, the struggle in life that transcends religion is the struggle for self-esteem. It is this struggle that ultimately gives meaning to life in the current world, not religion or theology per se. All religions, through culture, are put at the service of the meaning developed out of the struggle for self-esteem. The context in which the struggle for self-esteem takes place and thrives is of course as a "Hero System" within the confines of a particular culture. American Christianity takes place within the confines of and under the control of American racist cultural and social parameters. The job of liberation is to redefine all meaning within such a culture so that the self-esteem project of the oppressed rises to the same level as that of the oppressor, but within a culture defined by the oppressor's self-esteem machinery. In short, even God Himself cannot liberate us from a social hierarchy that, in meaning, is itself logically prior to religion. The way the Jews liberated themselves from the Egyptians, as well as from other oppressors, remains transparent to the scriptures mainly because what the Jews did transcended the bible and theology itself: They changed the paradigm of oppression so that God himself was redefined: He no longer was an "object" but was an "idea within the head," a "unitary God in the mind," as it were. This paradigm shift went beyond the normal confines of the cultural parameters. One could argue that this was a conceptual trick that transcends the context of culture and theology, and thus works in a world where the struggle for self-esteem is a superior value to, and that also transcends and is logically prior to, religion and theology. Absorbing this broad notion is of course a tricky proposition for religious people working within the context of a culture not of their own making. This remains the case even for a religious scholar as brilliant and as learned as professor Cone and his colleagues at the Union Theological Seminary. One of my heroes (also a graduate of the Union Theological Seminary) the illustrative Professor Cornel West has tried to finesse this very point by declaring himself a "Chekovian Christian." It is of course an obvious attempt to do exactly what Professor Cone is trying to do here: "Side step" th

Since this book was published, it has consistently been met with an authoritarian thunder by those who cling rigidly to their religious orthodoxy. I read this book while a graduate student in theology at the Pacific School of Religion. The professor who introduced me to Professor Cone's work (no wilting flower herself) Rosemary Radford Ruether, opened a new and vibrant awareness to the work of authors engaged in contextual and liberation theological perspectives. It is interesting to note that Professor Cone's book was written in a historic moment at the apex of black oppression in cities throughout this country: the oppression was disseminated under the rubric of economic exclusion, educational segregation, environmental terror, and job discrimination, to name a few. While Martin Luther King was the public face of overturning years of white terror perpetuated on black people, Professor Cone was giving voice to the anger and rage of en entire people and demanding the overturning of the forces of white privilege. While Cone was developing his version of liberation theology independent of its Latin American version developed by Gustav Gutierrez, both authors were giving voice to marginal populations now asserting their human dignity and worth. Moreover, these demands for justice began to form under new contexts of interpretive value of the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. The radical message of the gospel still reverberates well into our contemporary moment and raise the same issues Jesus raised in his own day. Patronage and systemic oppression needs to be confronted and overturned. This is the context from which Cone writes - and I suspect - still lives his life. I give Professor Cone's book my highest recommendation.

Dr. Cone presents a very challenging view of God and the world. In this work, he calls christians to re-evaluate their view of God and of the Christian faith in light of the experience of the oppressed and downtrodden. It uses the language of color in order to illustrate this point, using the color white to stand for evil, oppression, and sin and the color black to stand for the affirmation of our God given potential. This has clearly been informed by his upbringing and life experience. In this work he calls white people to hate their whiteness and embrace their blackness in solidarity with the oppressed. To use Cone's color language, I doubt many would disagree that Christ is clearly black, and all Christians are called to be as well.