is why Carter’s focus on the Jewishness of Jesus Christ as the ground for the body politic is so important and is preferable to Cone’s Christological politics of the oppressed.
Cone’s own hermeneutic often serves to relativize his conclusions. He states that we must recognize, as did Imamu Baraka, that “there is no objective anything,” to which Cone adds, “least of all theology.”154 He recognizes the situatedness of all ethical and theological inquiry and utilizes several proponents of the “sociology of knowledge” school to insist upon recognition of “the social context of theology.”155 While this important insight should not be ignored, the significance for my current purposes is that this trajectory leaves him with only one option: “The dissimilarity between Black Theology and white theology lies at the point of each having different mental grids which account for their different approaches to the gospel. I believe that the social a priori of Black Theology is closer to the axiological perspective of biblical revelation.”156 While this is arguably true, this relativizing trajectory places the burden of proof within sociological disciplinary confines and outside the realm of theology. In other words, theology here becomes only a Tillichian “answering discipline.”
If the truth of the biblical story is God’s liberation of the oppressed, then the social a priori of oppressors excludes the possibility of their hearing and seeing the truth of divine presence, because the conceptual universe of their thought contradicts the story of divine liberation. Only the poor and the weak have the axiological grid necessary for the hearing and the doing of the divine will disclosed in their midst . . . Since the gospel is liberation from bondage, and since the poor are obvious victims of oppression because of the inordinate power of the rich, it is clear that the poor have little to lose and everything to gain from Jesus Christ’s presence in history . . . This difference in socioeconomic status between the rich and the poor affected the way in which each responded to Jesus.157
Cone’s ontological freezing of the “difference in socioeconomic status” is further complicated by the fact that Cone calls “black people” “God’s poor people.”158 In like terms, he names “the oppressed” “God’s elect people.”159 And yet he maintains that “poverty is a contrived phenomenon, traceable to the rich and the powerful in this world” and that knowledge of this reality “requires that the poor practice political activity against the social and economic structure that makes them poor.”160 If poverty is described, I believe rightly so, as a “contrived phenomenon” perpetrated by the rich and powerful upon those who must struggle against it, would not that struggle, according to Cone’s logic, entail a rejection of the very ontological designation by which the poor receive divine election? In a similar vein, if “poor,” “black,” and “oppressed” are used by Cone as functionally synonymous, would not overcoming poverty and oppression be an exercise in self-hatred as one seeks to overcome blackness? Here is a marked ambiguity in Cone’s thought: he wants to explode oppression, poverty, and racist classificatory schemas while also privileging them within his hermeneutical framework. For Cone, the hopeful miscegenation envisioned by Carter could only breed a loss of election. The telos of Cone’s framework is a reification of ontological blackness.
There is little room for the realities of ethical complication in a schema of static ontology. Cone finds it hard to allow for the possibility that the objectified “subjects” of whiteness could acquiesce to living out the politics of objectification or that members of the regnant social order could repent and call objectification into question by choosing to be identified with those objectified. While he does not negate the latter scenario, he declares it to be “the rare possibility of conversion among white oppressors.”161 He maintains that “it must be made absolutely clear that it is the black community that decides both the authenticity of white conversion and also the part these converts will play in the black struggle of freedom” and that “[t]he converts can have nothing to say about the validity of their conversion experience.”162 While he astutely diagnoses both the chronic resistance of white theology to submit to unlike others and its propensity to co-opt the struggles of others in its own self-reflexive identity-struggles, the effect of redirecting the agency of reconciliation from the free work of God to the judgment of “the oppressed” is a weakening of the theological ground upon which the problematic patterns of white views of reconciliation may be criticized. While Cone’s stated intention is to escape “a view of reconciliation based on white values,”163 his solution is theologically problematic, based on his own insistence upon “the objective reality of reconciliation” as “an act of God.”164 Encouraging the passivity of whites in the process of reconciliation may also further encourage the problematic interior reflective patterns of whiteness. Cone recognizes this self-absorptive tendency in white theology, which he refers to as “a bourgeois exercise in intellectual masturbation.”165
While I suspect that Cone is overstating his position a bit in order to make a necessary point about the objectifying nature of most white talk about “reconciliation,” Carter reads Cone’s work as not being sufficiently “trenchant” in diagnosing what makes white theology “white.”166 Cone’s overstatement is displayed in his envisioning of a process of “reconciliation: black and white.”167
Whites must be made to realize that they are not only accountable to Roy Wilkins but also to Imamu Baraka. And if the latter says that reconciliation is out of the question, then nothing the former says can change that reality, for both are equally members of the black struggle of freedom. Unless whites can get every single black person to agree that reconciliation is realized, there is no place whatsoever for white rhetoric about the reconciling love of blacks and whites.168
While Cone’s point is that if whites are “truly converted” to the struggle for liberation they will “know that reconciliation is a gift that excludes boasting,”169 thereby precluding the possibility that “white converts” could use experiences in the “[black] community as evidence against blacks,” it seems improbable that Cone actually desires a logistical scenario in which white people try to “get” (a word that invokes manipulation) “every single black person” to validate them in their desire for community. There is not much that could more effectively encourage the paternalistic and self-obsessed psychology of whiteness than such a pursuit of reconciliation. Shifting the agency of reconciliation from the dominant social order to the objectified “other,” rather than recentering it on the particularity of the divine work in human history through the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, reconfirms the binary logic of whiteness. Cone more sufficiently summarizes his position when he notes that “liberation” is the “precondition for reconciliation.”170
Cone appears to recognize that freezing ontological status based on relative sociological status may not be an entirely valid move, allowing himself several moments of vulnerability in reflecting on his contention that “Jesus is black”:
If Jesus’ presence is real and not docetic, is it not true that Christ must be black in order to remain faithful to the divine promise to bear the suffering of the poor? Of course, I realize that “blackness” as a christological title may not be appropriate in the distant future or even in every human context in our present . . . But the validity of any christological title in any period of history is not decided by its universality but by this: whether in the particularity of its time it points to God’s universal will to liberate particular oppressed people from inhumanity. This is exactly what blackness does in the contemporary social existence of America . . . To say that Christ is black means that God, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, not only takes color seriously, he also takes it upon himself and discloses his will to make us whole.171
This is the point at which Cone’s argument gains the most traction and most clearly anticipates Carter’s later conclusion. Further clarifying this contention he states:
I realize that my theological limitations and my close identity with the social conditions of black people could blind me to the truth of the gospel. And maybe our white theologians are right when they insist that I have overlooked the universal significance of Jesus’ message. But I contend that there is no universalism that is
