purpose of liberating the oppressed, then they can continue to talk in theological abstractions, failing to recognize that such talk is not the gospel unless it is related to the concrete freedom of the little ones.172
By insisting on theological particularity, Cone prefigures Carter’s argument regarding supersessionism. Cone laments the divorce of theology and ethics, maintaining that this separation is a result of the Western imbibing of Greek philosophy rather than the Judeo-centric nexus of biblical revelation. This misstep has influenced the “exorbitant claims” Christian theologians have made regarding the “universal character of their discourse,” which “was consistent with the God of Plotinus but not with the God of Moses and Amos.”173 For Cone, questions related to theology and race cannot be considered without recognizing the misstep the Church took in substituting Greek discourses of philosophical power for the biblical discourse of liberation. This disregard for situatedness carries with it a universalizing motif that finds expression in certain “cultural values.”174 These cultural values are named by Carter as whiteness.
While Cone’s account of Jewish theological particularity prefigures Carter’s theology, his disallowing of transcendence locks him in a static ontology. Whereas Cone freezes humans as either “oppressed” or “oppressor,” Carter names them “Jews” and “Gentiles,” thereby more sufficiently decentering the creature in light of the free agency of the Creator, rendering both oppression and objectification theologically untenable. While Cone should not be expected to bear the burden of reflecting upon white identity, Cone’s theological trajectory tends to lock whiteness into a self-reflexive pattern that has trouble moving beyond “white guilt” into concrete work for justice, liberation, and relationship. If the white, Western worldview cannot be filled with a new spirit following the casting out of its demon, then it will produce little more than an “evil generation” filled with “seven other spirits more wicked than itself,”175 a reality we are witnessing in the escalation of racial violence in “colorblind” twenty-first-century America. Static ontologies are unable to contend against this evil.
Cone and the Lynched Flesh of Christ
In his most recent work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone more strongly states the universal import of his theology, suggesting the redemption that is possible for all people as they are together identified with the flesh of the oppressed and crucified One. In God of the Oppressed, Cone held out the possibility of repentance from whiteness, referring to it as “white people becoming black.”176 This suggests that even in his earlier thought, his static categories of identity were a bit more permeable than he overtly allowed. Just as “white” and “black” are not for Carter about racial reification, so for Cone blackness may be more about the flesh of Jesus than about racial essentialization. “Becoming black” is akin to Carter’s language of miscegenation, through which fictive blood lines are rejected in the desire of people for one another. If miscegenation threatens what Carter calls “the idolatrously false purity” of whiteness,177 then it is not inappropriate to envision repentance as blackness. For Carter, this does not mean that the particularities of any one people should be unilaterally enthroned or rejected. What it does mean is that the particularity which masquerades as universality (read: “whiteness”) is disavowed as various particularities together participate in the Jewish flesh of Jesus. Carter’s language of miscegenation, or what he calls “a theology of participation” over against “an ontology of separateness,” is a more precise formulation than Cone’s.178
Drawing from the grammar of Chalcedon, Carter maintains that orthodox Christology must be understood as the life of YHWH being fully suffused with the life of the creature. This covenantal Christology “decenter[s] dialectic” by refusing “ontologized understandings of the person and work of Jesus”:
The problem with dialectical thinking and related forms of philosophical thinking is that they begin from closure and then have to negotiate passage through an “ugly broad ditch” between things that are closed . . . The covenant witnesses to the fact that for God, and only because of God’s identity as God for us, there is no ditch to be crossed by us. God has from the first bound Godself to us in God’s communion with Israel as a communion for the world. This is the inner logic of the identity of Jesus, the inner logic by which Israel is always already a mulatto people precisely in being YHWH’s people, and by which therefore Jesus himself as the Israel of God is Mulatto . . . He is miscegenated, and out of the miscegenation discloses the God of Israel as the God of the Gentiles too.179
Because God is on both sides of the covenant, that of the Creator and that of the creature, dialectical frameworks such as Buber’s I-Thou are “not radical enough.”180 While Cone has labored to transform the I-It relationship that whiteness maintains with the “other” to an I-Thou relationship in which the latter party is no longer objectified by the former, Carter contends that Cone’s theology is ultimately unsuccessful in dislodging the “I” as the normalizing side of the equation. Carter explains that this formulation is “really only a settlement with whiteness, not its overcoming.”181 While it is “alluring” because it carries with it the benefit of a “settlement with blackness,” a settlement with the “blackness that whiteness created” is only a settlement with whiteness “in the idiom of cultural blackness.”182 In that arrangement, the “I relates to the other but allows it a separate-but-equal status in relationship to itself as I.”183 Carter’s analysis suggests the theological exhaustion that comes from the intellectual calisthenics necessary for the creature to attempt to fill the position of pseudo-creator as the universal “I.” Carter suggests the redemption that can be found in the arms of “impure” relations:
The conclusion to be drawn from my analysis is this: black liberation theology’s refusal to see the I, and in fact all of creation, in gratuitous terms, that is, as a covenantal reality, leaves the problem of whiteness uncontested, insofar as at root it is a theological problem. As a theological problem, whiteness names the refusal to trade against race. It names the refusal to enter into dependent, promiscuous, and in short, “contaminated” relations that resist an idolatrously false purity. The blackness that whiteness creates names the same refusal, albeit cast as the photo negative that yet retains the problem. What is needed is a vision of Christian identity, then, that calls us to holy “impurity” and “promiscuity,” a vision that calls for race trading against the benefits of whiteness so as to enter into the miscegenized or mulattic existence of divinization (theosis).184
As fraught with risks as this process may be, no less than this is at stake in the existence of a new body politic imaging Trinitarian mutuality. While a Conian ontologizing of blackness may be a helpful step out of objectifying relational patterns, a relationality of vulnerability and mutual dependance cannot be envisioned within his framework alone. Carter’s Christology more satisfactorily points to the beautiful messiness of the Incarnation.
I contend that, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone’s sounding of several more hopeful and conciliatory notes about the relational possibilities within the body of Jesus Christ allows him to more satisfactorily frame his critique of whiteness. I read The Cross and the Lynching Tree as written, at least in part, in response to Carter’s work. Cone is well aware of the work of Carter, about whom he has said: “I have nothing but praise for this work by a young African American scholar who must be reckoned with.”185 While I am not suggesting that Carter’s work was the direct impetus for the authoring of The Cross and the Lynching Tree, it seems that there are several points within the text at which Cone implicitly responds to Carter’s critique of him.186 Since Cone offers The Cross and the Lynching Tree as a “culmination” of his career, he is no doubt interested in utilizing the utmost precision in his theological formulations as he further cements his legacy. While some of his prophetic fury has mellowed a bit, his articulation of the theological problem of whiteness has intensified. Perhaps counterintuitively, this increased theological precision allows him to utilize rhetoric that is less self-conscious.
One gets the strong impression in reading God of the Oppressed that, for all its fire, the book was in some sense an apologetic to make black
