A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper
of ecclesial division is now presented in a different inflection. In his new preface to the second edition of God of the Oppressed, Cone invokes a desire to “make real the beloved community” and notes that:
Human beings are made for each other and no people can realize their full humanity except as they participate in its realization for others. While some critics, shocked by my accent on blackness, missed this universal note in my theology, it has been there from the beginning. The end point of my theology is as important as the particularity out of which it was born.193
Second, Cone calls for black and white alike to retell the story of the lynching tree in their veneration of the cross, suggesting that whites can “separate themselves from the culture that lynched blacks” by “confront[ing] their history and expos[ing] the sin of white supremacy.”194 He acknowledges that “a host” of people, “black, white and other[s] . . . of many walks of life,” “sacrificed their bodies and lives for . . . freedom.”195 This recognition, while perhaps being present throughout his work, has not been stated as clearly as it is now.
Third, in his criticism of Reinhold Niebuhr, Cone hints at the possibility that, in the ironic words of Niebuhr, “a fully developed interracial church” would be the “ultimate test.”196 Cone is not suggesting that Niebuhr’s observation was wrong, but criticizing Niebuhr for not working to make this a reality at Bethel Church in New York, when two African American parishioners were opposed in seeking membership. Niebuhr had remarked that he “never envisaged” an intentionally interracial worshipping community, explaining “I do not think we are ready for that.”
A fourth convergence with Carter is Cone’s subversion of a prominent modern theologian. While Carter directs his critique against Milbank, Cone explicitly calls Niebuhr to account for his failures to discern the primary theological hypocrisy of his age and thereby personally combat racial objectification. While Carter criticizes the Radical Orthodoxy of his teacher, Cone reproves his predecessor at Union Theological Seminary, the ethicist of “Christian realism” who has been a canonical source for much contemporary thinking on social justice and a key influence on Cone. Like Carter, Cone reveals how the “best” of “progressive” white theology often falls short of adequately addressing the theological problem of race. Cone presents Niebuhr as a Christian socialist who actively spoke out against racism and waxed eloquent about the “terrible beauty” of the cross while neither discerning the terrible irony of the lynching tree nor being able to submit to learning from black subjectivity.197 Niebuhr, whose social ethics focused on justice rather than love,198 demonstrated a “defect in the conscience of white Christians.”199 Niebuhr, while calling racism “the gravest social evil in our nation,”200 counseled gradualism in the struggle for black liberation, unlike either King or Malcolm X. Cone maintains that Niebuhr showed little interest in dialoguing with African Americans about racial injustice, preferring instead to speak on behalf of them.201 This critique is all the more trenchant given Cone’s personal story of joining the faculty of Union Seminary and receiving Niebuhr’s letter regarding his favorable, and yet paternalistic, assessment of Black Theology and Black Power.202 In contrast, Cone cites Bonhoeffer’s involvement in an African American church and his study of black theological and cultural resources during his time at Union to demonstrate that, “it has never been impossible” “for white people to empathize fully with the experience of black people.”203 While I will later address what may be problematic about this latter formulation of Cone’s, the point is that Cone suggests that Niebuhr failed to learn from King, although King explicitly cited Niebuhr as a primary influence. Cone laments that “[w]hite theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology.”204
Fifth, Cone is careful to qualify his invocations of mutual love by recognizing that reconciliation without liberation is empty.205 In referencing the work of the literary giants of the Harlem Renaissance, Cone contends: “Artists recognized that no real reconciliation could occur between blacks and whites without telling the painful and redeeming truths about their life together.”206 Whereas in God of the Oppressed reconciliation had been impossible without the unanimous and unilateral consent of blackness, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree shared truth is the prerequisite for life together. The reason Cone is hesitant to speak of reconciling love is because “whites acted in a superior manner for so long that it was difficult for them to even recognize their cultural and spiritual arrogance, blatant as it was to African Americans.”207
Sixth, Cone moves toward diagnosing what is faulty about the Christian imagination. He recognizes that the distortion of Christian identity runs so deep that “even in the black community the public meaning of Christianity was white.”208 He states that “the most ‘progressive’ of . . . white theologians and religious thinkers” have failed to recognize the distortion in the “American Christian imagination.”209 One cannot help but wonder if Cone has appropriated from Jennings this manner of phrasing the issue. Cone’s purpose has been to explore how one can simultaneously be black and Christian when Christian identity has been defined by whiteness.210 Cone’s focus on the distorted imagination of Christianity as white intuits Carter’s and Jennings’ critique of supersessionism.
Seventh, in exploring what he calls the racialized scale of “white over black,” Cone explains that the greatest fear of Anglo-Saxon civilization has historically been that of “race-mixing” or “mongrelization.”211 Even as sexual relations between the races were often consensual, miscegenation, or the perceived possibility of its occurrence, was the primary justification given for lynching. Protecting white women from the supposed “insatiable lust” of black men was the moral “duty” of white mobs.212 This was in a climate where African American men desiring to protect their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers from white male rape of black women often brought down “the full weight of Judge Lynch” upon themselves. If, as Cone maintains, the fear of miscegenation served as the ethical justification for the perpetration of one of America’s greatest evils, then for Carter to identify this Christological and ecclesiological “scandal” as the greatest hope for resisting the false gospel of whiteness is all the more poignant.
Eighth, Cone gestures beyond ontological blackness by presenting black faith much like an “icon” for the salvation of all people: “I wrestle with questions about black dignity in a world of white supremacy because I believe that the cultural and religious resources in the black experience could help all Americans cope with the legacy of white supremacy.”213 Cone offers all people the opportunity to “step into black people’s shoes” to realize that
humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst. Faith that emerged out of the scandal of the cross is not a faith of intellectuals or elites of any sort.214
Against the self-assumed vocation of the “elite” (which we will see is characteristic of Milbank’s ethics of virtue), Cone, like Carter, offers the historical and theological resources of black faith as a path out of the abstractions of whiteness.
In these ways, Cone, like Carter, presents the space of black-white relations as the space of the lynched body of Christ:
Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land. Neither blacks nor whites can be understood fully without reference to the other because of their common religious heritage as well as their joint relationship to the lynching experience. What happened to blacks also happened to whites. When whites lynched blacks, they were literally and symbolically lynching themselves—their sons, daughters, cousins, mothers, and fathers . . . Whites may be bad brothers and sisters . . . but they are still our sisters and brothers . . . All the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us—a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle for freedom . . . We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus . . . What God joined together, no one can tear apart.215
The Limits of Ontological Blackness
While I have listed eight themes in The Cross and the Lynching