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 will read Carter’s solution as a more sufficient theological rubric within which to consider questions of race, I do not read Carter as cancelling the trajectory of Cone. To the contrary, I maintain that Cone suggests many of the themes that Carter expounds upon, including the concreteness of being, the supersessionist impulse within white theology, and a just and liberating framework within which to imagine reconciliation. While I will read Carter as largely subverting the work of Milbank, I read him as entering into the legacy of Cone and redirecting it. In other words, taken together, the works of Cone and Carter are a “call and response” that, as in the ecstasy of worship, establishes new communal connections and initiates unexpected reflections on being. This non-Eurocentric method of discourse favors communal mutuality to unilateral agency. This aspect of the literary tenor of Carter’s work converges with his thesis of ontological mutual transcendence as an icon of Trinitarian relationality.
Cone and Carter explicitly share the same dogmatic focus: Christology. While Cone names Christology “the starting point for Christian thinking about God,”143 Carter recognizes that Christology is the “capstone of Christian thought”144 and the “theological site of contestation, the site at which to engage modern racial reasoning.”145 Carter reads Cone’s early phase as suggesting “a Christology that deals with the humanity of Jesus as a Jew.”146 Cone explains that “[t]he Jesus about whom I speak . . . is not primarily the one of Nicea and Chalcedon, nor of Luther, Calvin, and Barth . . . For christological reflections, I turn to the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul.”147 It is this Jesus who is “the Jesus of . . . the Spirituals and Gospel Music, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr.” The Jesus of “the biblical and black traditions” is “not a theological concept but a liberating presence.”
Whereas Carter fills out Cone’s Christology by focusing on the particular body of Jesus of Nazareth as the ground for the body politic, Cone’s insights into the particularity of Jesus do not sufficiently present Christ’s Jewish identity as encompassing, connecting, and reshaping all identity. Christ’s Jewish identity as the liberator of the oppressed and as an impoverished member of a first-century minority (as Howard Thurman called attention to in 1949148), means little more for Cone than that he is the God of oppressed people groups everywhere, particularly African Americans. Cone does not explore how it could be that the particularity of Jesus’ body redeems all particularities while simultaneously decentering European particularity-as-universality. Carter improvises beyond Cone in this regard, pointing toward a Christology of miscegenation that is both more radical than Cone’s and more sufficient in decentering whiteness as orienting anthropological metanarrative.149
Carter present a scandalous “impure” confluence of particularities centered upon the particularity of the body of Jesus of Nazareth as the path forward out of the strictures of race and the white hegemony that created them. For his part, Cone has difficulty seeing beyond his recognition that the black struggle is a more authentic representation of the incarnation of the Suffering Servant than is the triumphalist rhetoric often characteristic of both white liberalism and orthodoxy. This leaves Cone with the risky proposal that “black people” are “God’s Suffering Servant” for the “liberation of humanity.”150 While it is not my intent to debate the veracity of such a hermeneutical judgment, it does raise the question of the effects of “freezing” the status of “oppressed” and “oppressor” along racialized lines. If racialized identity is a product of the hierarchical evaluative scale of whiteness, then does not assigning divine election based upon such problematic ontological markers as race or socioeconomic status serve to reconfirm the identity categories of whiteness? At this point, Milbank’s work could offer a salient reminder that theology cannot simply sanctify the conclusions of sociology. Cone lays out a narrative of liberation from material oppression as the sole interpretative framework within which to exegete the Scriptures:
The hermeneutical principle for an exegesis of the Scriptures is the revelation of God in Christ as the Liberator of the oppressed from social oppression and to political struggle, wherein the poor recognize that their fight against poverty and injustice is not only consistent with the gospel but is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ the Liberator, the helper and the healer of the wounded, is the point of departure for valid exegesis of the Scriptures from a Christian perspective. Any starting point that ignores God in Christ as the Liberator of the oppressed or that makes salvation as liberation secondary is ipso facto invalid and thus heretical.151
While social liberation is no doubt an indispensable theme within the narrative of divine salvation, and while this motif has often been ignored within white Western theology, to narrow the scope of God’s work in the world to competing hermeneutical frameworks is a distinctly modern technique refined in the white academy. This exegetical tendency is what Carter refers to as the “oppositional struggle for the right to be hegemon.”152 A polity in which “otherness” is the morally preferable position will be a polity in which more people will find ever new categories by which to define themselves as “other.” As society increasingly splinters into competing groups staking this claim, it may relativize recognition of the evils perpetrated against those most often historically objectified. The problem of race, as the principal anthropological distortion in the history of the West, may not receive the careful and unique attention it requires.
A polity ordered around only a politics of identity cannot help but progress to an ever-increasing social splintering in which the only enemy is hegemony qua hegemony. Both the Christological category of Lordship153
