in a “black” church tradition. While he explicitly disavows the necessity that his reflections be judged against “the theological treatises of Euro-American theologians,”187 he nonetheless labors extensively to explain to the reader “why black people” utilize certain language or cultural forms in worship.188 Rhetorical formulations such as “this is what black people are affirming when they say . . . ” are presumably unnecessary for the very people Cone is describing. References to ecstasy in worship as “making it difficult for an observer to know what is actually happening,” demonstrate an ambiguity in Cone’s method. On the one hand, he wants to say that his utilization of black church traditions is in no way answerable to the white academy and, on the other hand, engages in describing what is “actually happening” in the worship of non-white bodies (as if the truth of the experience is found in an externally verifiable reality other than what the worshippers are themselves experiencing).
While this suggests that Cone is bound to presuppositions that favor white conceptions of rationality, in these moments one also feels that Cone is standing between two traditions and attempting to “translate” from one to the other. This proclivity in his work demonstrates both the paradoxical task of the black intellectual in modernity and, even in his early work, a marked desire to build connection and intimacy with others. Much in the same way as I interpreted Cone’s use of dialectic as a way of maintaining epistemological humility, I interpret Cone’s anger at subjugation as a deep desire for human connection and affirmation of the divinely-granted dignity of the creature. Rather than being committed to either dialectic or apologetic, Cone is defending people so as to establish non-objectifying connections between them. What I have characterized as Cone’s “apologetic of palatability” can also be read as desire for mutual vulnerability. Even in God of the Oppressed, while stressing “self-determination,”189 his goal was that “the neighbor [be] an end in himself or herself and not a means to an end.190 This posture is a point of convergence between the works of Cone and Carter.
In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone asserts the similarity between the instrument of the torture and death of Jesus at the hands of the Romans and the instrument of the torture and death of thousands of African Americans at the hands of white Americans. He asks how it could be that lynching has been so quickly “forgotten” in our collective memory and how it could be that the leading theologians of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries could have escaped the obvious parallels between them in their theological ethics. His contention is that white Americans would prefer to forget lynching because of the obvious Christological consequences of such a recognition, while black Americans have attempted to bury the memory because it is simply too painful to endure.191 Cone again presents black existence as cruciform existence, which bears similarities to Carter’s iconographic ontology. Whereas in God of the Oppressed the path from bondage to liberation was self-determination alone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree the hope is that the demon of racism can be exorcised in part by white recognition of complicity in sin and a communal re-telling of the story of liberation. I will demonstrate several ways in which Cone’s thought is moving in the direction of Carter’s.
First, he states that his purpose in writing is that the “credibility and promise of the Christian gospel” would be maintained and that the hope of “heal[ing] the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society” would be realized.192 While not being inconsistent with his earlier thought, the stated desire for the healing 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 . .
