"JAMES CONE"

“JAMES CONE” 

            On Saturday, April 28, my friend Gayraud Wilmore called me to tell me that James Cone had died that morning from cancer.  Gay and James Cone were long time colleagues and friends, having written together two volumes of a seminal work on black history and black theology:  “Black Theology:  A Documentary History.”  I had known that Dr. Cone was gravely ill, but like many of you, I was taken aback by his death.   One of my white theologian colleagues called Cone the greatest American theologian of the 20^th century and perhaps of all of American history. 

            He and I share a couple of similarities:  he was short, and he was from Arkansas.   He was born in Fordyce and grew up in Beardon, in towns between Pine Bluff and El Dorado.  Growing up in white supremacy, I never knew him or knew who he was until his book “Black Theology and Black Power” burst upon the scene.  He argued persuasively that there was a river (to borrow from Vincent Harding) of black theology and black power that had been flowing through American history, and that it was now bursting out from its underground streams to make its impact upon our lives together.

            James Cone published many other books, and although I never met him, his work had great impact upon my thinking and my perceptual apparatus.   He influenced me in many ways, but three stand out for me.  First, although he was not the origin of it, he spoke in new ways about the value of the black experience.  Though the word “black experience” is complex and has many meanings, Cone basically used it to describe a fundamental sense of being marginalized by the culture.  No matter how much money one has or what status one has achieved, there still can, and often will be, those moments when white supremacist culture rises to remind one of their marginalized status.  Though Cone lamented this reality, he did not hang his individual or cultural head in shame.  In fact, he sought to appropriate “blackness” as a more profound way into the human spirit, as a safeguard against the dominant white supremacist culture.  Indeed he used it as a springboard to a deeper meaning of life, and he joined in and added verses to the idea that “black is beautiful.” 

            Second, as a Christian theologian, he moved the Gospel message and the Biblical message from the domination of European models to the black experience.  He helped us hear in ways that we had not heard before:  Jesus was black.  In the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we see the movement of blackness into the Trinity, into the Godhead herself.  Those who have been reading my series of articles in Hospitality Magazine will recognize that Cone (and Gay Wilmore and Jacqueline Grant) is a primary source of the black Jesus.  In referring to Jesus as black, Cone reminds us of two important things about the Gospel that we often forget (or choose to dis-remember) in our affluent, capitalisitc society.  First, Jesus was not white.  Jesus was dark-skinned, a brown Palestinian Jew.  In our color-soaked society, this is revolutionary.  The Lord and Savior claimed by the white evangelicals, who elected Trump as president, is dark-skinned.  But, Cone was not content to stay on the skin-color level.  He asserted that Jesus was “black,” that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus are rooted in the black experience in the West, and indeed in all sectors of life.  Jesus was black because Jesus was oppressed, living his life on the margins, lynched by a mob under the tacit approval of the Roman empire, and raised by a God who brought new life into the old, dead world.  Cone pushed this idea to its most powerful form in emphasizing that Jesus pointed us to the “God of the oppressed,” the title of one of his fine books.

            Cone’s third primary emphasis for me was his insistence that those who are classified as “white” must come to terms with our addiction to race and racism before we can make steps toward salvation.  I’ve listed elsewhere the seven steps that we as “white” folk must work in order to begin to find our true identity as children of God (recognition, repentance, resistance, resilience, reparations, reconciliation, recovery).  In theological terms, I would call it our captivity.  Our hearts and minds and perceptual apparatus have been taken over by the power of race, and until we can acknowledge that and seek to find liberation, we will simply be fooling ourselves if we seek to call ourselves Christians.

            So, thanks to God for James Cone, and thanks to James Cone for his ministry and fierce commitment to justice.  If you are not familiar with him, check out one of his many books.  If you have not read any of them, start with “Martin and Malcolm and America,” a brilliant study of the relationship between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  Or, you can check out his powerful “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.”  In light of the subject of this last book, there is no small irony that Cone passed on to the next realm in the same week that the National Memorial on lynching opened in Montgomery.