A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper
existential and ontological situation: the struggle for being against the threat of nonbeing.” It is this later move, referred to by Carter as a “nonhistorical, existential moment” of liberation over against the “privileging” of “a given history . . . as the dominant or unifying narrative,”130 that Carter finds to be least sufficient for overcoming the strictures of racialized identity.
Carter is unconvinced of the necessity of dialectical intellectual arrangements. In suggesting a corrective to Cone’s dialecticism, he offers a prolepsis of his own Maximian Trinitarian conclusion:
[T]he dialectical gap between Christ and culture, between time and eternity, viewed in Christological and Trinitarian terms is really no gap at all. This is because the distance between them, the diastema, and difference between God and the creature . . . is always already traversed within the very person of the Logos and in the unity he has with the Father through the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the traversal of time by eternity—the idea at the core of a theological understanding of transcendence—is, in fact, what frees creation to be itself.131
Carter suggests that the early promise of Cone’s work for “theologically disrupt[ing] modernity’s analytics of race,” recedes to a later ontology which “diasallows transcendence and thus recapitulates the inner logic of modern racial reasoning.”132 While Carter is not content with the end goal being a Barthian dialectic, which he reads as insufficiently acknowledging creation’s—or cultures’—contributions to their relationship with the Father,133 he prefers this particularizing dialectical arrangement to Cone’s later universalizing dialectic. However, Carter finds hope for a way out of racialized identity in an eschewal of dialectic altogether in favor of a more classically Eastern incarnational Christology grounded in Trinitarian relationality.
While I find Carter’s critique of Cone’s ontologically racialized identity to be trenchant, I nonetheless fear that at certain points Carter has both exaggerated the lacunae in Cone’s thought and underemphasized his own affinity with Cone’s methodology. While affirming Carter’s Maximian focus, I am wary of too easily proclaiming the death of dialectic. In the next chapter in our analysis of Milbank, we shall see how an emphasis on the Logos as collapsing the distance between God and culture easily slips into a far too cozy correspondence between Christ and culture.134 I am not fully convinced that, from the point of view of the creature, some sort of dialectical tension can be fully done away with. While it is true that the gap between God and creation has already been crossed from the perspective of divine agency, dialectical tension is useful for the purpose of stressing the finitude and limitations of human agency and creaturely knowledge. As I see it, Cone’s consistent usage of the rhetoric of dialectic is not so much a Christological misstep as it is a way to maintain epistemological humility. Cone reveals the motive behind this aspect of his theological methodology in God of the Oppressed:
[T]he theologian must accept the burden and the risk laid upon him or her by both social existence and divine revelation, realizing that they must be approached dialectically, and thus their exact relationship cannot be solved once and for all time. There can only be tentative solutions which must be revised for every generation and for different settings. When theologians speak about God, they must be careful that their language takes account of the ambiguity and frailty of human speech through humility and openness. They can never assume that they have spoken the last word. But the recognition of the limitations should not lead to the conclusion that there is no word to be said. Indeed the clue to our word and God’s Word is found in human history when divine revelation and social existence are joined together as one reality.135
Cone was attempting to combat the same problem that Carter would later address: the self-reflexive cataphatic anthropology of theological whiteness. While Carter acknowledges that his attacks on whiteness would not be possible without the preliminary volleys of pioneers such as Cone, I cannot help but wonder if dialectic (especially during the cultural milieu in which the early Cone was writing) is a helpful “epistemologically impoverished”136 method of exposing the hubris of the pseudotheological tendencies of whiteness. I am not sure that Cone holds to dialectic solely because he is beholden to the binary logic of modernity. It seems more probable that Cone utilizes dialectic because of the paradoxical task of offering a counter-narrative from the perspective of the underside of modernity; Carter is engaged in a similar task.
Having made this brief caveat into Cone’s use of dialectic, I still find Carter’s argument quite compelling and believe that a reading of Cone demonstrates the limitations of his theological program as suggested by Carter. Carter distances himself from what he names the result of Cone’s theological project: “ontological blackness.”137 Carter borrows this phrase from Victor Anderson, who diagnoses Cone’s theology as a form of “cultural idolatry,” a contention Carter engages in “filling out” through his own analysis of Cone.
The two primary texts of Cone that Carter interprets are his earliest monograph, Black Theology and Black Power, and Risks of Faith, his latest book at the time of the publication of Carter’s Race. Carter utilizes both the earlier book (which, in 1969, was a version of Cone’s doctoral thesis) and the later work (published in 1999) to demonstrate the trajectory of Cone’s career and to highlight several distinctions between his earlier and later thinking surrounding theology and race. In order to adhere to this interpretive method, I take as my primary texts Cone’s God of the Oppressed (1975) and his recent masterwork The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011).138
I use these two texts for several reasons. One, since Carter has so thoroughly excavated Black Theology and Black Power and Risks of Faith, a fresh look at others of Cone’s works will allow me to more adequately compare the two theologians. Two, in a move consonant with the hermeneutical paradigm Carter has established, taking these two texts together demonstrates the arc of Cone’s career and Carter’s increasing divergence from his work. Three, God of the Oppressed and The Cross and the Lynching Tree are the texts that Cone himself offers as representative of his career. In the preface to the 1997 edition of God of the Oppressed, Cone maintains that this text “represents my most developed theological position.”139 Likewise, Cone’s Introduction to The Cross and the Lynching Tree names this text “a continuation and culmination of all my previous books.”140 Four, Cone overtly names his purpose in writing God of the Oppressed the utilization of the black church experience as his primary theological source. Responding to critics who accused him of relying too heavily on white, Western theological sources, Cone intentionally grounded this text in what he terms the greatest influence on his theological perspective and “the true source” of “the black theological enterprise”: “the black community.”141 Cone uses a similar methodology in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Carter makes a similar hermeneutical choice in his invocation of voices from antebellum African American Christianity. Cone and Carter both offer theological reflections that draw on African American theological thought and the black experience of race in America, while incorporating other voices from throughout the Christian tradition.
Cone and the Christological Politics of the Oppressed
God of the Oppressed is the clearest expression of Cone’s systematic theology. Cone later reflected on its writing: “Silence on both white supremacy and the black struggle against racial segregation made me angry with a fiery rage that had to find expression . . . I wrote because words were my weapons to resist, to affirm black humanity, and to defend it.”142 While attempts have been made to classify Cone as simply reactionary, a direct reading of Cone does not bear out this reductionism. Rather than muting his constructive theological insights, his understandable anger at centuries of brutal subjugation and murder often perpetrated in the name of “Christian” mission serves as a catalyst for his perceptive insights. What is surprising is not that anger finds expression in his work, but that this drive is so singularly focused toward a constructive theological vision for liberation and for race relations structured around justice.
I want to situate Cone as a scholar of his times without being reductive. My contention is that where Carter and Cone differ, it is largely due to the realities of the struggles for liberation faced in their respective cultural milieux. As Carter acknowledges, he has the benefit of writing in a theological atmosphere shaped by Cone. While I will read Cone as often collapsing into an ontology of identity that reinscribes the racial analytics of whiteness, and while I