manner of phrasing the issue. Cone’s purpose has been to explore how one can simultaneously be black and Christian when Christian identity has been defined by whiteness.210 Cone’s focus on the distorted imagination of Christianity as white intuits Carter’s and Jennings’ critique of supersessionism.
Seventh, in exploring what he calls the racialized scale of “white over black,” Cone explains that the greatest fear of Anglo-Saxon civilization has historically been that of “race-mixing” or “mongrelization.”211 Even as sexual relations between the races were often consensual, miscegenation, or the perceived possibility of its occurrence, was the primary justification given for lynching. Protecting white women from the supposed “insatiable lust” of black men was the moral “duty” of white mobs.212 This was in a climate where African American men desiring to protect their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers from white male rape of black women often brought down “the full weight of Judge Lynch” upon themselves. If, as Cone maintains, the fear of miscegenation served as the ethical justification for the perpetration of one of America’s greatest evils, then for Carter to identify this Christological and ecclesiological “scandal” as the greatest hope for resisting the false gospel of whiteness is all the more poignant.
Eighth, Cone gestures beyond ontological blackness by presenting black faith much like an “icon” for the salvation of all people: “I wrestle with questions about black dignity in a world of white supremacy because I believe that the cultural and religious resources in the black experience could help all Americans cope with the legacy of white supremacy.”213 Cone offers all people the opportunity to “step into black people’s shoes” to realize that
humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst. Faith that emerged out of the scandal of the cross is not a faith of intellectuals or elites of any sort.214
Against the self-assumed vocation of the “elite” (which we will see is characteristic of Milbank’s ethics of virtue), Cone, like Carter, offers the historical and theological resources of black faith as a path out of the abstractions of whiteness.
In these ways, Cone, like Carter, presents the space of black-white relations as the space of the lynched body of Christ:
Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land. Neither blacks nor whites can be understood fully without reference to the other because of their common religious heritage as well as their joint relationship to the lynching experience. What happened to blacks also happened to whites. When whites lynched blacks, they were literally and symbolically lynching themselves—their sons, daughters, cousins, mothers, and fathers . . . Whites may be bad brothers and sisters . . . but they are still our sisters and brothers . . . All the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us—a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle for freedom . . . We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus . . . What God joined together, no one can tear apart.215
The Limits of Ontological Blackness
While I have listed eight themes in The Cross and the Lynching Tree which demonstrate that Cone’s thought is moving in the direction of Carter, I will suggest that, for all its flourish, Cone’s theology is in the end less radical than that of Carter.
First, I am unconvinced by Cone’s assertion, in relation to Bonhoeffer, that anyone can “empathize fully” with the experience of another. I am likewise unconvinced that any person can “fully” understand his or her own experience. While I appreciate the point Cone is making, empathy is ultimately less radical than participation. “Empathy” names a quest to share the feelings of another. “Empathy” alone can be as much an exercise in objectification as antipathy. It does not necessarily cross what Carter terms the “ugly broad ditch” of dialectic; empathy does not exclude the possibility of an “ontology of separateness”; empathy is less radical than mutual participation. Bonhoeffer, who is Cone’s example of one who “fully empathize[d]” with black subjectivity, demonstrates in Creation and Fall that he does not trust even his own conscience.216 In Discipleship, Bonhoeffer flatly declares the quest for relational immediacy to be antithetical to the Gospel.217 If Jesus Christ is the sole mediator, then empathy, in addition to not being “fully” possible, could provide a substitute for the path of the cross, through which one receives the “other” back through the participatory mediation of Christ’s body. Perhaps this “forgetfulness” of self in the knowledge of God is what enabled Bonhoeffer to more adequately respect, learn from, and be immersed in nonwhite theological resources and ecclesial communities. Carter’s theology of “participation” moves the church in this direction. Miscegenation, as understood by Carter, names trading against race and becoming dependent upon the “unlike” other in order to enter divinization. This mulattic participation is to be distinguished from empathy.
Second, that Carter’s vision is more radical than Cone’s is seen in the paternalisms that plague Cone’s work. Cone regularly speaks as if he were an outside observer categorizing those he desires to see liberated. For instance, while Cone confesses that he has been justifiably criticized for not satisfactorily listening to female voices in his work, when he does listen male paternalism sometimes creeps into even his most favorable assessments. In presenting Ida B. Wells’ campaign against lynching as a prime example of theological integrity, Cone claims that “black women activists . . . did not need theological imagination to show [lynching to be wrong].”218 Yet he has already labored to show that the lived experience of resistance produces theological imaginations that are profound in ways that more formal and detached reflections are not. Cone’s implication that the experiential insights of women engaged in the struggle for freedom were less sophisticated theologically suggests that he maintains male subjectivity as the normalizing pole of the equation. Likewise, when referring to black ministers with “little or no formal training in academic theology,” Cone claims that “they spoke from their hearts, appealing to their life experience . . . and the Spirit of God” while proclaiming “what they felt in song and sermon.”219 Yet again, why should “little or no formal training in academic theology” render someone unable to speak from the mind, as well as from the heart? Can those who have not been assimilated into white, Western theology not love God with all their minds? Is not Cone’s appeal to “untutored” African American preachers’ reliance upon their hearts and the Spirit very similar to those white authors like Piper who picture “the black experience” as adding a bit of soul or spirit to the Western tradition?220 What does this have to say about Cone’s views of what constitutes rationality and the “human”? As can be seen through these two examples, Cone’s ontological blackness far too frequently produces objectifying classifications.
Finally, Cone’s racialized ontology causes him to inadequately theorize Jewish identity. Whereas the early Cone suggested the particularity of the Jewish flesh of Jesus as the antidote to abstracting, white theology, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree Cone several times equates Jewishness and whiteness. For example, he calls Julius Bloch both a “white artist” and a “Jew from Germany.”221 He paradoxically names Abel Meeropol, author of Strange Fruit, a “white Jewish school teacher” while attributing his sensitivity about racial injustice to being part of a “marginalized community who had a long history of suffering at the hands of white Christians.”222 While Jewishness and whiteness may be used interchangeably within modern, racialized identity reflections, Jennings contends that the colonial genesis of racialization was born out of a desire to extricate the Jewish contagion from European lands. This demonstrates that Cone does not conceive of whiteness as primarily a sociopolitical order but a skin color, which cannot but slip into essentialized conceptions of race. Carter maintains that Jewish flesh is covenantal, not racial flesh. We will see in the next chapter that race, in the modern era, was activated by distancing
