James Cone's theology is easy to like and hard to live

All theology starts with the particularity of the theologian’s experience, believed James Cone, who died Saturday at the age of 79. “I was born in Fordyce, Arkansas,” begins his groundbreaking work of black theology, God of the Oppressed. “Two important realities shaped my consciousness: the black Church experience and the sociopolitical significance of white people.”

These words were published in 1975. That same year, I was born in Geneva, New York, in a white middle-class family that went to church every Sunday. I grew up knowing nothing about the black church experience, and I was so immersed in the sociopolitical significance of white people that it never crossed my mind to think there was any other way of experiencing life in the United States. In other words, I’m exactly the kind of person with whom Cone was angry for much of his life. And I believe that his anger was justified. But my biggest sin, I’ve now come to realize, wasn’t the fact of my identity as a white person who grew up oblivious to my privilege. My biggest sin is that when I first read Cone’s writing in graduate school—and for years thereafter—I thought his theology was easy.

Though the founder of black theology, Cone was in some ways a traditional theologian, especially in wanting to affirm both the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith and hold them in a dialectical tension. In God of the Oppressed, Cone works through this tension by elaborating three statements: Jesus is who he was, Jesus is who he is, and Jesus is who he will be. Jesus was a Jewish man whose ministry was aimed at liberation of oppressed people 2000 years ago—and we encounter that same man today as the risen Lord who is present to us in our struggles. Not just any risen Lord, but one who is black. Christ comes into the world and takes on the quality of blackness (along with all of the oppression that blackness carries with it), countering the sin of racism by becoming one who suffers from it. But he is also black symbolically—and in that sense, he is present wherever there is human suffering.