the story of Israel, his historiographic method subtly reinscribes whiteness by being overly optimistic about the liberating power of modern civil religion.
Carter finds Raboteau to be most helpful when he is most theological. In his closing exposition of the “hidden wholeness” between the visions of King and Thomas Merton, who in the common year of their deaths (1968) were in the process of planning a shared retreat, Raboteau maintains that what unites contemplation and action is a kenotic, sacrificial love. It is this love that identifies with the oppressed, unites people “beyond barriers of race, nationality, and religion,” and proclaims that “there are no aliens, no enemies, no others, but only sisters and brothers.”124 It is this latter observation that Carter favorably appropriates as he emphasizes the kenotic love of the particular body of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth.125 It is this salvation narrative that offers an appropriate theology of history.
James H. Cone: Theologizing Race
Cone and Ontological Blackness
We now turn to analyzing Carter’s relationship to James Cone, pioneer of black liberation theology and professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary. The significance of Cone for theologies of liberation in the twentieth century cannot be overstated. Cone was actively involved in the struggle for civil rights in America in the nineteen-sixties, including drafting the 1969 public statement on “Black Theology,” and his theology has been read by oppressed people groups around the world. Cone is a public intellectual whose work has profoundly shaped American civic discourse about race and has opened the door to considerations of the problematic theological posture of whiteness. In this section we will see that Carter draws on Cone in order to diagnose white theology as an abstracting system that undervalues particularity, while ultimately deeming Cone’s oppositional dialectic insufficient for escaping the bonds of racial reasoning, bound as it is to the binary logic of whiteness.
While Carter favorably appropriates the early Cone’s Barthian stress on the concreteness of being, he reads the abstraction of Cone’s later, more Tillichian framework as problematic.126 Carter finds Cone’s early Barthian dialectic between God and creature to be replaced by a later Tillichian dialectic between being and nonbeing.127 Black liberation from oppression becomes the “courage to be.”128 Carter maintains that Cone “remains, to the end, a dialectical thinker”129 in that the “original, antisupersessionist promise” of Cone’s Barthian focus on particularity has been replaced by “Christianity . . . as the answer to a singular, transhistorically 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
